Default font size in gnome

[Felix Miata]

On 2009/02/28 18:34 (GMT+0100) Nicolò Chieffo composed:

> I wanted to do a check. I booted the alpha 5 livecd on 2 laptops:
> a 15.4" with 1280x800
> and my 14.1" with 1440x900

> The result is strange, since the 2 laptops render the font in 2 different ways.

> The first looks really good (and now I've understood why lots of
> people here are saying that the default font is ok)
> The second instead renders the font as it was BOLD.

> See the 2 photos of a comparison, taken with an 8mpx digital camera:
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/23227153/1280x1024_15.4.JPG
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/23227175/1440x900_14.JPG

Next time use screencaps. They'll fit our screens, be smaller file sizes and
will show the whole desktop with nothing missing and no space wasted on room
background.

> Can you tell me if this is normal? I really thought that the result
> should be exactly the same, but as you can see it isn't.

15.4" 1280x800 is 98 DPI, so the 10pt DejaVu Sans system font is 13.61px.
14.1" 1440x900 is 120 DPI, the 10pt DejaVu Sans system font is 16.67px.

Now on both systems, open
http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-comps-dejavu.html to compare those sizes
and you should see the difference is expected.

"Bolder" fonts at higher DPI is typical, because there is only 1px stem width
available in smaller sizes, while at larger sizes it jumps to 2px. Except to
the extent anti-alias & sub-pixel affects the apparent width, there can be no
fractional px in font stems, so it's either 1, or 2, until sizes have a whole
lot more px to work with for each character. It takes upwards of 300 DPI to
eliminate the effect.

If you change your 14.1" laptop's system menu font from DejaVu Sans to
something else, you may see the apparent bolding disappear. Changing DejaVu
Sans from 10pt to 9pt might have a similar apparent effect.
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Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/