[arch-general] Howto adjust font scaling in Arch? All fonts look a bit big and fat?

[Adrian C.]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009, David C. Rankin wrote:

> Lastly, "xrdb -q | grep dpi" doesn't seem to be set on any of my Arch 
> or suse boxes -- should it be? If so, to what? Thanks.

You can check the current DPI value with xdpyinfo:
$ xdpyinfo | grep resolution

...while you are at it also check
$ xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

You can force some DPI value on X init with --dpi, or calculate and set 
proper DisplaySize (nvidia driver also has DPI option which takes 
precedence over DisplaySize) in xorg.conf (Monitor section of course). 
Recently you can also set DPI with xrandr (--dpi) on drivers which 
support it.

Both Gnome and KDE font configuration managers would modify the X 
resource database (and ~/.Xdefaults or Xresources), which are used by 
all using fontconfig. The above mentioned DisplaySize... still helps 
with some legacy applications so if possible it's good to do both.

Historically Windows used 96 DPI 
(http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2005/11/08/490490.aspx) and 
Linux distributions 75. Since Microsoft fonts (like verdana) are very 
popular for the web (others even on the Linux desktop), and we live in a 
Microsoft world... users would even up the value where appropriate.

When you didn't provide a display size X would query the monitor and 
eventually fallback to 75 - which was very common some time ago. These 
days I guess you just have two very different monitors.


-- 
Adrian C. (anrxc) | anrxc..sysphere.org | PGP ID: D20A0618
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