On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Tom Horsley wrote:
I think I know what the real problem is with getting good font display by default. There isn't enough information in the xorg.conf file to scale the fonts properly. It came to me when thinking about this, that the bigger your monitor, the farther back you tend to sit. The algorithms rampant in the various font systems on linux seem to scale based on a linear algorithm considering only dots per inch, and not taking into account how far away from the monitor you probably sit. This didn't seem like it could be an original thought, so I did a little web searching and found this: http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb02.asp As the author points out, what you want is for the font to subtend the same angle to be the same apparent point size. We either need xorg.conf to include a new DistanceFromMonitor parameter that can be factored into the font scaling, or we just need the scalaing algorithms to use a heuristic that guesses you are likely to be sitting farther away the larger your monitor is (or both - it might be nice to have a relatively small monitor, but inform X you are gonna be looking at it from across the room, so it needs to scale the fonts way up, so a heuristic wouldn't necessarily always work, but could be a good default).
One thing I find helps is correctly setting DPI in the font configuration screen. There is other good advice collected at http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc5_setup.shtml.
-- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
