reducing minimum button width

[Plmalternate Plmalternate]

There are supposed to be  3 ways, to style Yad dialogs. I can't get any of them to have any effect.  The ways I know of:
- Include a line like this in scripts before the yad commands:
    export GTK_THEME="some_theme_for_yad" [I tried themes with a Gtk-3 component.]
- Invoke yad with an option like this:
   --gtkrc=FILENAME - I tried with various files copied from working themes or suggestions found on the net.
- Invoke yad with an option like this:
   --theme='theme name'
   where 'theme name' is any of the names obtained with the command
   yad --show-themes
   which are NOT the themes from /usr/share/themes but a set I think I recall from the Bad Old Days of using Gedit.
   
This is Yad 7.2 (GTK+ 3.24.24). Can anybody  show me an explicit working example of any of these methods working complete with file content, name, location, and yad syntax? My most pressing objective is to reduce the minimum button width. Yad adds horizontal padding around the labels for buttons with short labels.