It seems that right now, Xfbdev is started with the *actual* DPI (285). As a result, "normal" font sizes such as Bitstream Vera Mono 11 are HUGE compared to the display size on Neo1973.
There is a bug open in the bugzilla about this: http://bugzilla.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla//show_bug.cgi?id=59 It seems the approach is to report the actual DPI (285) to the X server and then adapt the font sizes to suit this. I am not convinced that this is the right approach - but I'm not too savvy in this thing so please feel free correct me. I will try to explain myself a bit. For applications developed for the device itself, Openmoko apps, the dpi the server is being reported is pretty much meaningless - the font sizes in Openmoko apps can be adjusted to be suitable. And more to the point - since the applications seem to adjust their button sizes and other layout to the size of the screen, the text sizes should scale according to the button and window sizes in pixels. If the buttons and texts are not scaled in sync, we will end up with odd screens where there are huge buttons and tiny text in the center, or worse yet, small buttons where the text overflows the button boundaries. But I'm not sure if this is technically as easy to achieve - so just hardcoding fontsizes which are in sync with the DPI should be good enough. So, if Openmoko apps can be adapted to the DPI, the DPI mostly affects software that is *not* specifically targeted for the Neo1973. And there in comes my gripe. With such a high DPI value just about all software (which are affected by DPI) become unusable, since the text on the software is way too large for the screen. If the user interface in the program also adapts to DPI, that will most likely not fit on the Neo1973 screen either. This is ofcourse obvious - if I take my 24" monitor and separate the physical size of the Neo1973 screen from it - nothing at all will fit there. This is all because DPI is used (wrongly) to scale fonts to be the same physical size everywhere - where as the perceived size of the font changes depending on how far the user is from the display device. And the Neo1973 is used from a much shorter distance than normal displays. So, I would suggest that the DPI value would be picked so that the perceived size of characters on the Neo1973 screen would be similar. But even more so, the DPI value should be picked so that it is a reasonable compromise between text readability and interface size on *unmodified* 3rd party programs. I think a good method on finding the "best" DPI value is to think of a web-browser running on Neo1973. Adjust the DPI so that normal body text is readable on the Neo1973 and that a decent amount of text fits on the screen. Such a DPI value would probably work best for most cases. There is ofcourse the issue of being correct - DPI given to Xfbdev should be the physical DPI of the device and all software should adapt to that. But we don't live in a perfect world and there's loads of 3rd party software around that can't be changed so easily. TIA, -- Naked
