[arch-general] Overly large fonts in X11 after rebooting

[Ray Kohler]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Samuel Baldwin
<recursive.forest at gmail.com> wrote:
> For some reason when I turned my laptop on today and started X, all my
> fonts were larger than normal. The only one that seems to have the
> stayed has been my console font, but even that feels a bit "off"
> (however, I'm not too worried about that, it could be that I'm sitting
> slightly closer than normal; the rest are most certainly measurably
> larger, though). The only difference between now and previously is
> that I don't have my external monitor plugged in, but my resolution
> didn't change, and I've used this computer without the external before
> without problems.
>
> It's just simply bigger; I turned down the GTK font, which seems to
> have worked for some apps (like firefox and pidgin), but the fonts are
> unbearably large for some websites:
> http://logik.li/images/screenshots/arrakis/large_fonts_in_some_places.png
>
> A few months ago I had a similar problem with certain sites having
> large fonts, and never really managed to solve it, one day after
> reinstalling it just went away and never came back until now. This was
> probably related.
>
> This is what similar sites used to look like:
> http://logik.li/images/screenshots/arrakis/let_me_show_you.png (and
> when they used to be bad:
> http://logik.li/images/screenshots/arrakis/126-negative_what_log-p.png
> )
>
> So, anyone have any ideas about what I should do?

Check the DPI of your display (with xdpyinfo). Probably the lack of
the external monitor made it come up differently.

I dealt with this by fixing the XFT DPI value to 96, which is what
most fonts are designed for, and what most software that cares,
expects it to be. This can be done by setting the X property "xft.dpi"
to "96".