(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 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs