Ssconvert is now using cairo directly to print stylized versions of the sheet widget objects. Gnumeric on the other hand uses gtk offscreen rendering of the widgets. While the latter should provide widgets that match the screen display, I am not sure whether it is worth the trouble!

in 1.10.17 widgets were not properly displayed (not scaled) and sometimes, when the sheet object was not large enough, they were just truncated.

I would just remove sheet_widget_draw_cairo(). That would probably also fix #705653.

re comment #2:

I don't see that with 1.10.17. But of course I might not look at teh correct widgets.

re comment #3:

I assume you mean that we should just use the cairo version that we are now using for ssconvert. That would of course any problems we may have had with 1.10.17 and we would also need to figure out how to make it work with GtkStyle rather than a hard coded font and size.

We should not use GtkStyle anymore, but GtkStyleContext.
In 1.10.17, widgets were not scaled to fit inside the requested area. This is quite visible with a very small button, the text is hardly visible in 1.10.17

This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.