Todd Zullinger: >> the gnome font setup now uses some heuristic to >> try and divine a proper dpi from the monitor size or other details Tom Horsley: > Yep. It uses the info the monitor provides about its size and > resolution. For me, that meant that it found I was hooked up > to a 1920x1080 42 inch HTDV monitor, and it concluded that it > obviously should be using 53 DPI, which resulted in most fonts > showing up about 5 pixels high. It took quite a while to find > the fonts setting dialog so I could manually switch to 96 DPI > and get fonts I could actually read :-). > > As soon as I could finally see what I was doing, I submitted > this bugzilla: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=377651 Strictly speaking, what you're complaining about is right, and what you're complaining for is wrong. DPI means dots per inch. i.e. How many dots are there for displaying something within an inch of display space. This value should be what the display actually is. Once set, the system can display things at their real sizes upon demand. e.g. If you have to draw a 1 cm circle, you can do so. Likewise for other precise, and absolute sized, fonts. There's an argument for setting a greeking level, where the system knows its pointless trying to render something that small. But that's another thing, again. The problem lays with how the system renders fonts and how you get to pick the sizes you want. If I pick to use 12 point text, it's a specific actual size, and the system should adjust the number of dots it uses to render the font, according to my DPI, so that the font always appears the same physical size. It just has greater or poor resolution (is drawn with finer curves, or has steppy lumps like an old dot-matrix printer). This is really how we should be asked to set fonts (with point sizing). The trouble is that a lot of software gets you to set font sizes in pixels, which is a problem in itself. As either they genuinely mean pixels, so 12 pixel fonts on a 100 dpi screen is a font 12/100 of a inch high. Or they make some presumption about pixel sizes being some size completely unrelated to the actual pixel size, so people who would have picked 12 point text on their word processor get something similar sized when they pick 12 pixel text (though it's usually not described as being "pixels" just *size* 12), and it uses DPI as a scaling factor, giving you a completely variable font size. Font sizing choosers (web browsers, for your desktop, or whatever) should not ask you to choose a font size in pixels. That's the real bug. -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.23.1-10.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
