Gutsy Kubuntu font problems

[Anand Buddhdev]

I'd been happily using Kubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) until yesterday, and 
then I upgraded :( Here's the problem.

I have an Nvidia card, and an Acer 19" flat screen running at 1280x1024.

On Feisty, I set all my desktop fonts to DejaVu Sans, size 11. This is the 
perfect size for my eyes. I also set GTK to use the same font at size 11. 
This allowed Firefox and a couple of other GTK applications to work at 
the same font size. All applications (with the exception of OpenOffice) 
looked the same, and I was happy with that setup.

On Gutsy, it has all gone wrong. The fonts look bigger than they did on 
Feisty. If I select 10-point fonts, they become too tiny. It's like 
there's a big jump in size from 10 to 11. Strangely though, the GTK 
applications continue to show the fonts properly. This "problem" only 
affects KDE apps.

I read that in Gutsy, the DPI from the X server is now used to render 
fonts, instead of the fixed default of 96. I therefore attempted to fix 
the DPI by applying the following settings in xorg.conf

in the driver section:

Option "UseEdidDpi" "False"
Option "DPI" "96 x 96"

I restarted X, and xdpyinfo shows that my DPI is now 96x96. However, the 
font situation did not change.

In the KDE control panel, I also tried the setting to force fonts at 96 
DPI. Also no difference. The fonts are either too small at 10-point, or 
too big at 11-point. What is weird though, is that if I turn the force 
DPI setting back to OFF, the fonts in newly started applications display 
at the proper size (like they did on Feisty). However, this is only 
temporary, and the effect disappears if I log out and back in again. It's 
truly frustrating.

In order to eliminate any old or cached settings, I completely 
re-installed Gutsy from scratch, and made a new user account, so it would 
start with a fresh profile. Again, no difference.

I am so annoyed with this upgrade, that I am seriously considering going 
back to Feisty (at least for now). My Feisty desktop was pleasure to work 
with, and the font rendering was beautiful. KDE and Gnome/GTK apps all 
used the same uniform font.

What have other people experienced? Is there a fix in the works for this 
font problem?

-- 
Anand