Geany does not accept specifying fractional font sizes via the preferences dialog or configuration files. If a fractional font size is input, the font size is capped to the integer portion of the value. This happens despite Scintilla supporting fractional font sizes since 3.0.0.
Arch Linux, Geany 1.24.1.
Geany just passes the font it receives from the GTK font dialog to scintilla, it does not interpret it. Fractional sizes are read from the dialog, stored and restored from Geany.conf.
Clearly Scintilla does not support fractional font sizes when set this way.