Font

[ilsaul]

Hi,
i have mdk 9 on a Dell inspiron8100.

i have install a new drive 4191 for mdk 9

now work but the font it's very bigger.

in 1280 i have font very little before.

What i can do for came back to that font!

bye
Saul

[bwkaz]

Mandrake 7.2 did the same thing when I moved from driver 0.9-769 to 1.0-1251 (or was it 1.0-1541? I don't remember for sure...).

The problem was that really old nVidia drivers don't report the proper DPI to the X server. New ones (anything 1.0-1541 and newer) do.

Old drivers (including the default driver) think that the DPI is 72 or 75, while the new drivers know that it's 100 or so.

What you can do is figure out how many DPI you should be getting, according to your monitor's real size (yes, that's right, measure it), then convert that to a millimeter size for your monitor, then tell X to use that monitor size in its config file.

Or, you could move to a distro that calculates the correct DPI on installation.

Or, you could drop down to an 8-point font rather than a 12-point font in your distro's setup.

Any of those *should* work.

[ilsaul]

Hi,

ok i understand i calculate the diagonal is 383 mm.

now u talk about convert, how?

I need to insert in a XF86Config-4? How?

bye
ilsaul

[bwkaz]

You don't want the diagonal size, you want the horizontal and vertical size, in mm.

When I said "convert it", I was thinking convert from DPI to dots per millimeter, but you don't have do even do that, so ignore that comment. :o

But do add, in XF86Config(-4), in the Monitor section, a DisplaySize xxx yyy line, where xxx is the horizontal millimeter dimension, and yyy is the vertical.

Restart X and see if that helps. But now that I think about it more, I'm not really sure it will... I think what you really need to do is reconfigure your desktop's fonts. But whatever.

[ilsaul]

Hi,
i arrive in the same time to your solution

my monitor is 317x230 arround.
i try DisplaySize 317 230, but nothing change.
i try 380x340 and my font bicame little.
:) :D :cool:

i don't know if it's good or not but work.

Do u think taht some other work worst now?

bye
ilsaul

[bwkaz]

You could always lie to X about your monitor's size.

Take the video resolution you use (1280x1024?), divide each dimension by 75, and that will be the number of inches that you want X to see. Multiplying each by 25.4 will yield the number of millimeters to use for DisplaySize. If you want.

I still think that the cleanest solution is to ignore DisplaySize completely (that is, get rid of it), and set your Gnome or KDE font to something that's 8 point rather than 12. I know this is possible in KDE, but I forget where the setting is. I'd think Gnome has the setting too.

Actually, you may be using some other window manager. If that's the case, see if there's documentation on how to change its fonts.

[ilsaul]

My resolution is 1600x1200. It's Dell Notebook inspiron 8100. :D

I just try to change the font inside KDE, but some application don't follow that.
Then i prefer tell to X the resolution.

thx
ilsaul

[stevemcmillen]

The DisplaySize trick did help out. I actually had to lie to X to get a font size equivalent to what the old nv drivers provided. However, like the last poster pointed out, some apps don't respect the dpi computed from the DisplaySize and you end up getting large fonts (for example, fonts are really large in Mozilla 1.4).

This all seems really annoying. The old drivers seemed to do a better job of generting the expected size font. (though there were probably cases where the old model did not work so well).

Is the new behavior really a fix?

Is the right fix to bug developers like the Mozilla team to respect X settings properly? I don't know enough about this issue to understand where the bug lives or I guess if this is even really a bug (though I'd argue strongly that this is not very desireable behavior).