Bill Wohler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: BW> It's generally better to go with the higher resolution 100 dpi BW> fonts, right? With the latest upgrade, I swapped the order of the BW> fonts in /etc/X11/fs/config and /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 so that the BW> 100 dpi fonts would take precedence. BW> BW> Unfortunately, this makes the fonts HUGE.
So the size of the fonts in pixels is easily computed from the point size and the font resolution.[1] The same point-size font will be a third larger (in pixels) in 100dpi than in 75dpi. My opinion is that it's best to use the right font size in points, with as high a display resolution as you can manage. This setup has the nice consequence that you get consistently sized fonts in terms of "how big the letters are". That, and bigger monitors get you a larger display area even at the same number of pixels. (Though this philosophy is causing me issues right now: I have a 1920x1440 display on what I think is a 19" display. At any rate, xpdyinfo tells me the display resolution is 143x146 dpi, which is more-or-less 150 dpi. Unfortunately, X won't give me fonts with a higher display resolution than 100dpi unless I explicitly ask. Font names like -*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-100-0-0-*-*-iso8859-1, for example, which should be "scalable at the normal resolution", come back in 100dpi. Right now I've hacked my .Xresources file to guess the right display resolution from the xrdb X_RESOLUTION variable [which comes back in pixels per *meter*, of all possible units], and specify a display resolution for fonts based on that, but this doesn't help Gtk+ apps at all. Is there a better solution, hopefully involving convincing the X server to use the right display resolution for fonts? [2]) BW> How much does my screen resolution (1280x1024 and 1280x768) and BW> monitor dot pitch come into play? Measure your monitor. Divide pixel width by physical inch width to get dots per inch. That's roughly the "right" font resolution. (And scarily, 1024x768 on a 14" monitor comes close to 100dpi.) [1] Specifically: pixels = points * (1in/72pt) * dpi [2] Umm, *cower*, on XFree86 4.0.2 on a RH7.1 machine. I'd hope this wouldn't make a difference, though it might be something that works better with a newer version of XFree86. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell
