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New Making font sizes obey my hand signals... while I go insane.
I have been trying to get my Xandros install to render fonts at 96 dpi. Having compared 75 dpi to 96 dpi it seems that with fonts of similar size (i.e. 11 pt 75 dpi and 8pt 96 dpi), the 96 dpi font is generally cleaner, sharper, and easier to read. I don't know if that's true, or if it's just psychological, but either way it *works* for me, so there you are.

But attempting to set the UI to 96 dpi has been a royal fucking pain the ass.

The official-unofficial recommendation from the Xandros boards is to modify the /etc/kde3/kdm/Xservers file, adding "-dpi 96" to the endof every line that hasn't been commented out. This works *only* if you don't have an entry for 75dpi unscaled fonts in your xorg.conf file -- otherwise you get 96 dpi at the login screen, then after you log in it seems to switch back to 75 dpi.

(So just comment out the 75 dpi font entry in xorg.conf, you say? Heh. Hold on a moment).

So the way you get around *that* is to also add an .Xresources file in the home directory of every account you want to display at 96 dpi, and you need to put "Xft.dpi:96" in it. When you do this, then everything you launch in that session will launch at 96 dpi.

As long as it's a KDE application. Apparently. For gnome applications, you then have to run the gnome-control-center app and set the font settings manually to 96 dpi, because Xandros has lousy gnome/kde integration compared to Kubuntu.

And if you should ever launch any applications that run as root, you'll need to do the same thing for your root account.

(Why don't you just do the .Xresources file and ignore the modification of the /etc/kde3/kdm/Xresources file? Because .Xresources doesn't kick in until you log in -- so the login file is stuck on 72 dpi. Nobody wants that, do they? DO THEY??? HUH?????????)

Right.

Now, it *used* to be that for every mozilla based application (firefox, thunderbird, nvu) you had to put a userChrome.css file in each account folder with the font information you wanted, but these days it seems they respond fairly well to the gnome settings. And once you're done with that, see, your KDE and Gnome applications should all be displaying at 96 dpi just dandy. (Note that I never had to do *this* for Kubuntu, either. Xandros is sort of retarded when it comes to integrating applications from different environments.) And that's mostly true, though Skype for some reason has some small, illegible text in its setup panel that will respond to none of my hand signals, and the logout menu that pops up in Xandros is displaying 11 point text fonts even though NONE of my font settings are set to 11 point text. At the moment, I'm assuming the text isn't important, because if it is I'm screwed. Whatever. It's annoying, and I'd love to learn how to fix it, but I'm not there yet.

(And I should note that Skype's text is screwed up regardless of whether Xanrdros is set to 75 dpi or 96 dpi. It's one of those Great Mysteries of Why the Hell Do I Use Computers Again?)

There's still another problem at this point, however: X applications (applications that are neither gnome nor kde, just X) don't recognize any of the fucking hand-waving I've already done. No, because you see, they used these fixed, bitmapped fonts that are set up in xorg.conf. There are two sets of fonts it can use: 75dpi unscaled, and 100dpi unscaled.

So I run audacity and xmms from time to time -- both X applications -- and these applications seem to assume that the only dpi around is 75... so the font sizes of these apps are set with that in mind. The font size for xmms and audacity menus are set to about 11 pt, I think, which at 75 dpi looks roughly like 8pt text when you're running at 96 dpi. Of course, at 96 dpi apparently X switches to the 100 dpi unscaled fonts, which means that the 11 pt text looks GROTESQUELY HUGE compared to the rest of my menu text.

Solving that problem requires you comment out the line in xorg.conf that loads the 100dpi unscaled fonts, which forces it to load the 75 dpi fonts and all the menu text scales just fine.

So at this point, after doing all that crap, it's almost all uniform in size. But wait! That sonofabitch logout prompt text is still twice as large as any font setting I've been able to set! It's either hard-coded into its default size or it's controlled by a configuration file that I know nothing about (and that they haven't bothered to tell me anything about).

Bastards. All of them. Yes. Him too.

But hey, at least this time I didn't crash anything. :)
"We are all born originals -- why is it so many of us die copies?"
- Edward Young
New That makes my head hurt. Condolences. :-(
New ICLRPD^3 (new thread)
Created as new thread #234552 titled [link|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=234552|ICLRPD^3]
===

Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Unscaled fonts...
...are used in the order they're found in the file. If you want 100DPI fonts first, put those entries before the 75DPI ones. Or just take the 75DPI entries out.


Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
New How do you know this?
Is there documentation anywhere that explains things like this, or do you have to dive into the source (or spend hours tinkering) to learn this stuff?

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Found out the hard way.
Moved the relevant entries in the X configuration file, and ba-dum *tish*, I got the fonts I wanted.


Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
New Actually, in this instance...
it was the 75dpi fonts I needed it to use (because the 100dpi fonts were being scaled oddly) and they were listed first. I had to remark out the 100 dpi font line in order for it to be skipped over.
"We are all born originals -- why is it so many of us die copies?"
- Edward Young
New Also...
...sounds like Someone's Ready For A Mac.

OS X is more-or-less font nirvana.


Peter
[link|http://www.no2id.net/|Don't Let The Terrorists Win]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
New Yeah, if I had the scratch...
... I'd buy me a Powerbook.
"We are all born originals -- why is it so many of us die copies?"
- Edward Young
     Making font sizes obey my hand signals... while I go insane. - (cwbrenn) - (8)
         That makes my head hurt. Condolences. :-( -NT - (Another Scott)
         ICLRPD^3 (new thread) - (drewk)
         Unscaled fonts... - (pwhysall) - (3)
             How do you know this? - (Another Scott) - (2)
                 Found out the hard way. - (pwhysall) - (1)
                     Actually, in this instance... - (cwbrenn)
         Also... - (pwhysall) - (1)
             Yeah, if I had the scratch... - (cwbrenn)

Yay! You got a... thing.
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