Proposal: reduce base font size from 10pt to 9pt for Karmic Koala release

[Remco]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 22:01, Conn <subpsyke at eircom.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Ditto. If those are in fact 9pt and not 8pt something is unusual on your
>> comparison XP. Windows UI fonts have usually been ridiculously small
>> (8pt),
>> but I have encountered the use of 9pt in W2K & WXP when "large" has not
>> been
>> selected in settings. The browser and office app document fonts have
>> always
>> been 12pt by default. The difference in size is a function of area, not
>> nominal size, meaning that 12pt is 2.25 times the size of 8pt (12^2 / 8^2)
>> and 1.78 times the size of 9pt (12^2 / 9^2).
>
> I dual-boot between XP and Ubuntu, and use a bookmark synchronization
> extension for Firefox. Looking at my Firefox bookmarks toolbar (which is
> identical in layout between operating systems), Windows XP can fit about 10
> bookmarks on-screen, whereas Ubuntu can fit only 7, or at most 8 with a
> short title. The entire interface of Ubuntu looks unnecessarily bloated.
>
> As I posted in my previous comment, my screen should use 91dpi rendering. I
> have manually set this value, and while fonts looks slightly more compact
> compared to the default setting, /in my opinion/, 10pt is still too bloated.

In my opinion, even a 9pt application font is still too bloated. I
have the following output from xdpyinfo:

  dimensions:    1920x1200 pixels (372x230 millimeters)
  resolution:    131x133 dots per inch

On this setup, with the correct DPI set, 10pt looks *huge*. 9pt is
still too much for my tastes. 8pt feels very natural.

Screenshots:
10pt: http://www.few.vu.nl/~rkg230/files/Screenshot10pt.png
9pt: http://www.few.vu.nl/~rkg230/files/Screenshot9pt.png
8pt: http://www.few.vu.nl/~rkg230/files/Screenshot8pt.png

Also, you can see in the 10pt and 9pt screenshots that the text of the
CPU monitor on the top panel doesn't fit inside the applet anymore.

-- 
Remco