Weirdness with font size.

pascall · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 2:17 pm Post subject: Weirdness with font size.

I had this problem with MDK 8.1, and I have it since i am on gentoo (about 9 months). Was to lazy to post, and actually feared that no one could answer me.

Problem is strange : I start X and kde a first time (login manager used : kdm), then I use the control panel to set my desktop and my fonts the way I like it (let s say I choose Arial 12).

Problem is that this Arial 12 doesn t represent the same size on my screen from one execution of the xserver to the next : sometimes fonts in kdm (and then kde after login) looks the way I want them, sometimes they look huge... This is completly random, not predictable from my point of view... And I thought computer were deterministic machines ... Lol

This is not a real annoyance, cause I just have to restart the X server till the fonts have the apparent size I want, but still I am courious. If anyone has hints for me to explain this behavious, you re more thean welcome (moderator and developpers welcome, i am really curious about the cause)...

green sun · Guru Joined: 04 Nov 2002 Posts: 325 Location: Wista, MA

**TOTAL GUESS**

Do you have any display resolution settings in X config file? I know this could mess up your font sizes... maybe X is testing & using different res settings? Just a guess... I know there is some utility in Gimp to get your actual display resolution. Then just poke around here on how to set it in the X config...

Hope this helps...

pascall · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 7:57 pm Post subject:

Green sun, I just checked and there is no resolution definition in my XF86Config file. There is ony the actual screen section, where you set the resolution you want to use, but no definition for the modes themselves (no modelines to describe the display modes).

Codec & Electron · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 8:24 pm Post subject:

You should start X with a specific dpi resolution. Since you are using KDM you could edit the file $KDEDIR/share/config/kdm/Xservers and append -dpi 75 (or any value that suits you) to the line the server start command is defined, eg:

pascall · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 8:30 pm Post subject:

Thanks C&E I ll check that later at home ( I have ssh acces to my boz from work but the ssh installed here does not support X11 forwarding - security reasons).

Could be the source of the problem. I ll keep u posted on that.

Anyway thanks for ur help.

pascall · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:43 am Post subject:

And no...

It worked fine for almost one week and then tonight decided to do the same again... Had added -dvi 75 on my command line for X... but no use... I am really wondering what can cause this weirdness.

mr_neutron · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:49 pm Post subject:

I had the same problem when I was using KDE, and I am quite sure it is a hardware problem: Every time the fonts were changed, I also noticed that the Screen size had changed a little (black bars at the bottom and the top, ~50mm wide).
Now, with other window managers (fluxbox), or even winME / win2000, I do have the black bars from time to time, but the fonts do not change.
I suspect that my Monitor (17" CTX) randomly reports a smaller screen size and thus higher dpi value to the OS, but only KDE actually reads the dpi value and changes the fonts accordingly.

pascall · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 2:19 pm Post subject:

Thanks mr_meutron,

could be an explanation. I ve not noticed any black bars but could be that my monitor (Samsung 700NF) reprts a wrong size. But should'nt the -dpi switch in the X command line override this ?

vitke · n00b Joined: 18 Feb 2003 Posts: 24

I have the same problem. Fonts change randomly and unpredictably (or at least that's how it looks like) whenever I start X. This does not apply only for KDE but also for fvwm2, I don't know about the other environments. But this does not affect all aplications! It affects KDE programs, it also affects Mozilla even if I run it under fvwm2, but it does not affect gvim under KDE or under fvwm2 (although it does use different fonts in KDE and in fvwm2, I don't know why, I thought that a line like guifont=-misc-console-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-160-iso10646-1
from ~/.gvimrc identifies a font uniquely), and it does not affect fvwm2 components. I think that this all started when I installed KDE 3.1 The Buggy.

Since it also applies on konsole, I tried to

emerge unmerge qt xft
emerge -e /usr/portage/x11-libs/qt/qt-3.1.0-r1.ebuild

as someone proposed at

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=33568&

but it did not work and now I am emergeing qt-3.1.0-r3 in order to be able to run KDE again.

MaGNuS_Z · Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2003 11:53 pm Post subject:

I have the same problem. I used to have it on Suse also. Most of the time fonts in gdm are correct but sometimes when X is restarted the fonts are much smaller... right now i just restart X (ctrl-alt-backspace) and the fonts are back to normal but it's strange.

If i log in when the fonts are small every fonts in every apps are smaller. It took me a while to figure out that there were only 2 fonts size used and that i should restart X when the incorrect one is used. Before that i was reajusting fonts everytime so when the fonts were tiny i enlarged them but after a restart they were too big... so i shrunk them but next reboot they were too small, etc... If you need to resize the fonts to 17 or 18 points just to have a normal size you're probably loosing your time, keep the default font size and restart X instead.

I would really like to get rid of this problem. I'm down with only 3 problems now (including this one) and when they are resolved i will be glad to call Gentoo the best OS i ever had!

hbbio · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 38 Location: Paris, France

I have the same problem with font getting smaller on X startup. At first, I thought only gnome (latest as of today) was affected but now I switched KDE I found it was having the same problem... Curiously, fonts display still ok within the web page of konqueror, but all desktop fonts are messed up. I had a workaround: open the gnome fonts dialog with gnome-control-panel (only tried over fluxbox), close the font dialog and restart X...

It'd be glad to have this issue solved, which looks as a total mystery for me, especially after having read your tried and missed...

bernieb · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Apr 2003 Posts: 119

I had similar issues as well. There's an option called "DisplaySize" that
when placed in the monitor section of XF86Config file, will override the size
that the monitor reports to the X server.

Bookmarc · Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2003 4:02 am Post subject:

I'm having the same problem here also...
It all began when I installed Mozilla 1.3 and one of the dependencies was a newer version of libfontconfig ...

Fonts have been all messed out since then ...

i'm reinstalling shortly so I hope everything will get back to normal !