No matter how hard I tried to change the font and the size of the text in a notebook, it does not change! Every time I see the same standard font and size and no errors are displayed in the console. This was on debian, I changed the system to archlinux and the problem remains, it means the matter in your program!
See: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12773
Marking as duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 12773 ***