(subscribing fragos so the reply is seen)
George:
Font appearance is a huge topic. One of the problems is that what should happen
is often not always what people prefer. The second problem is incorrect or
missing information.
As the density of dots goes up things look smaller (unless there is some
scaling involved). Pretend you have a white 10 pixel x 10 pixel cube on a
screen that is 10cm across and up across at 640x480. If you then change to
1280x960 that 10 pixel x 10 pixel cube is now 5cm up and across. For things
like text and application size this effect is undesirable. The plan to
counteract this was simple - look at the DPI and scale things accordingly so
that the physical size would always remain the same no matter what density of
dots your screen had. After all a document printed on a 300DPI printer doesn't
look any smaller than the same document printed on a 1200DPI printer - it just
looks of a lower quality. Alas this type of resolution independence is not what
people are used to on computer screens. If you start making the text bigger
when people set their screen size to 1600x1200 some portion of people will
complain that everything has become too big because they are used to (and now
prefer) everything becoming smaller as the resolution goes up. Even small
variations can cause complaint ("this web page using pixel sized fonts doesn't
look right any more") so usually only two DPI settings that are used in
practice on screens at the moment - 96DPI and 120DPI. There are also programs
out there that don't understand DPI at all and behave badly if you deviate from
the two aforementioned sizes. I believe GNOME calculates the font DPI the first
time it ever started and then checks to see if 96 or 120 is closer. If you are
using something like a TV (which has a very low DPI compared to a monitor) then
you may well find fonts are far too small to read unless you manually change
the setting.
The second problem are screens/drivers that misreport the DPI of the
screen. This can be nothing short of disaster as the lie can result in a
low fallback DPI causing fonts to appear absolutely miniscule and
generating a large number of complaints. Sometimes the DPI can be
correct on one boot then different on the next leading to quirky
behaviour.
--
Fonts in Gome are too small
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/118327
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Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu.
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