Firefox+KDE Font/DPI issues. Tried EVERYTHING. No work.

[jbinto]

Forgive me if I overlook some stuff. I had the whole thing typed in and of course I closed Firefox to test something and forgot I hadn't submitted. Ugh.

Anyway, I had some trouble with font sizes when I installed KDE. Everything was really small.

I have a 32" LCD HDTV. This is the cause of my problems I would imagine, or is it QT? I use Gentoo with GTK/XFCE on my laptop and Gentoo with GTK/Enlightenment on another (rarely used) desktop. Now I'm taking the plunge into KDE, and I like it a lot so far, except for it's behaviour with Firefox.

When I got KDE, however, everything was way too small. I soon figured out it was a DPI issue and startx - --dpi 72 fixed everything.

Then I installed firefox.

No matter what combination of magic numbers I use, nothing works.

I know there are three ways to set DPI in Xorg:

• startx - --dpi 72
  
• DisplaySize X Y in xorg.conf
  
• Xft.dpi: X in .Xresources
  

and there are three ways to set DPI in Firefox:

• browser.display.screen_resolution in about:config
  
• "Use system setting" in Appearance config
  
• Minimum font size
  

So I fiddled and fussed with all of these settings, and NOTHING produces usable output from Firefox. The best I can do is startx - --dpi 72 which makes KDE look right, 72dpi in about:config which makes Firefox's MENUS look right, but the text is still WAY too small, and minimum font size of 18(!) to make things appear like they are 12pt. This works, until one visits a CSS heavy website, and then everything is out of proportion (images and text don't line up, for instance).

So I googled and searched and tried this:
http://www.mozilla.org/unix/dpi.html

[My_World]

Have a look here:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg_and_Fonts

At the bottom is some KDE and Firefox/Thunderbird troubleshooting tips.

Shout if it doesn't help!

_________________
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Gentoo is too hard for me".

[jbinto]

Well, that did help me beautify my fonts (antialiasing) and bring some web-standards (Bitstream Vera Sans beats vanilla Sans) but that did not fix my PROPORTIONALITY problem.

At the very least, you now know my exact font configuration, as I copied those settings verbatim.

Current setup:
- KDE 3.5, Firefox 1.5, HDTV as only monitor at 1216x684 (16:9)
- startx modified to pass -dpi 72
- .Xresources has Xft.dpi: 72.0
- Firefox DPI configured to (guess it) 72

Current issues:
- Menus are still HUGE relative to the webpage body.
- On a website like last.fm, which has forced font size in some parts, but not others, the smaller fonts (eg 10pt 12pt) are unreadable, but the rest of the site is fine. Using ctrl-wheelup makes all the fonts bigger so I can read the forced small ones, but now the rest of the page is huge. Screenshot below.
- Proportionality is destroyed when using min font size. If "readable" is 16pt, and "unreadable" is 12pt, min font size forces 12pt to be scaled up to 16pt, so all proportion is killed as fonts are all now the same size when some fonts are meant to be smaller. Min font size is a dirty, hackish, bandaid solution and does not solve the underlying problems. Screenshot below.

If all the pages on the web were like Google, Gmail etc and didn't force sizes and used relative font sizes like +1 -1 and not 12pt 10pt, then this wouldn't be a problem. Get to any fancy CSS website and it all goes to hell. The main text tends to be readable with default font size of 16, but any menus, etc, are always way too small.

If I go and decrease the DPI in firefox (at one point I had it set to 60, so I could use 12pt fonts as 12pt fonts and not be forced to use 16pts) then the menus become triple the size while the text only double (for instance). Either ridiculously huge menus and readable text, or slightly too big menus and unreadable text. That's the tradeoff.

Here's what I'm going to do in this order:
- unmerge ~x86 firefox (1.5), try 1.07
- ditch KDE/Qt entirely, install xfce or *shudder* gnome
- hope for some useful response here

While I have always been an opponent of bloat and I never really liked the idea of KDE, I've been happy with it (especially amarok) until I started messing around in Firefox. I don't really rely on many GUI applications so I don't have any real experience crossbreeding KDE and GTK applications. For example, I don't use GIMP but I'd not be surprised if these same symptoms were exhibited there. This is probably a KDE/GTK problem rather than a firefox problem, but that doesn't make me feel any better.

On a related note, KDE's fonts were also unreadably small too until I started doing DisplaySize in xorg.conf and/or -dpi 72 at the startx level. Does Firefox not respect these settings?

Screenshots:

Last.fm without min font size (see top right corner, user info)
http://tinyurl.com/epna8

Last.fm with min font size (see top right corner has changed, but nothing else has!)
http://tinyurl.com/hlhm3

Also notice in these screenshots the relative size of the menus compared to the body text. That ratio is constant -- when I decrease DPI, those fonts get huger as the body text get slightly bigger.

Grrr!

[jbinto]

Update:

- Firefox 1.07 exhibits same symptoms.
- Using 96dpi, last.fm (and most of the web) is readable but the damn menus are still huge.

[.squid]

What happens when you set dpi to 38 (1216 / 32), leaving everything else at default settings ?

[jbinto]

Which one?

Firefox's?
.Xresource's?
startx -dpi argument?

[jbinto]

I'll assume you mean Firefox.

Default settings (deleted ~/.mozilla), 38 dpi.

The menus are unreadably small, the small text on the last.fm is even smaller, but all "normal" text is still normal.

What is the significance of divide by 32?

[.squid]

Sorry, I meant startx --dpi 38 ... ?

BTW, firefox's menu/dialog font size can be fixed by creating a file .gtkrc-2.0 in ur home dir and putting there smth like

[jbinto]

I'm fairly certain startx - --dpi 38 will make KDE in general unreadably small (or big, I can never remember). I've settled on 72dpi for X in general. Without dpi arguments it assumes something ridiculous and is too small.

Looking into that .gtkrc-2.0 file now. It seems it's the same as what's generated by the KDE GTK compatibility control centre thing.

I forgot to mention, in my effort to fix this, I installed gtk-engines-qt-0.6-r2 without really knowing what it does.

[jbinto]

Getting somewhere... I'd not say it's been solved but Yet Another Dirty Hack.

Firefox's MENUS respects .gtkrc-2.0, BUT it applies it's OWN DPI setting against it, NOT xorg's.
Firefox's TEXT only looks right with 96 DPI (Firefox dpi settings).

KDE/everything else only looks right with 72 DPI (startx dpi settings).

So, here's yet another tradeoff:

Firefox looks PERFECT with:
- startx - --dpi 72
- Verdana 8 in .gtkrc-2.0
- 96dpi in Firefox

But since _only_ Firefox uses 96 DPI, other GTK applications (mhwaveedit, the only other one I have atm) display Verdana 8 too small.

So here's the hack. I'm sure it will blow up in my face one day when Firefox fixes some bugs or when I use an older GTK application:

~/.gtkrc-2.0:

[jbinto]

[quote="jbinto"]Getting somewhere... I'd not say it's been solved but Yet Another Dirty Hack.

Firefox's MENUS respects .gtkrc-2.0, BUT it applies it's OWN DPI setting against it, NOT xorg's.
Firefox's TEXT only looks right with 96 DPI (Firefox dpi settings).

KDE/everything else only looks right with 72 DPI (startx dpi settings).

So, here's yet another tradeoff:

Firefox looks PERFECT with:
- startx - --dpi 72
- Verdana 8 in .gtkrc-2.0
- 96dpi in Firefox

But since _only_ Firefox uses 96 DPI, other GTK applications (mhwaveedit, the only other one I have atm) display Verdana 8 too small.

So here's the hack. I'm sure it will blow up in my face one day when Firefox fixes some bugs or when I use an older GTK application:

~/.gtkrc-2.0:

[Mandos]

Fonts in Firefox have always been a problem for me too. As a matter of interest, if you haven't already done it
could you add to about:config a string labelled "font.size.unit" and give it a value of "pt".
Firefox by default specifies font sizes in pixels, which is affected by DPI settings (a ten pixel font looks
much larger on a 15 inch display at 800x600 resolution than it does displayed on a 1200DPI device such as
a laser printer (assuming a direct pixel:dot mapping)), a ten point font should be the same size regardless of
the DPI of the device if the software knows what it is rendering on DPIwise.

[omp]

[evilspoons]

[labba]

[hayalci]

The section in the wiki has been moved,

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg_and_Fonts#KDE_Applications_Size_Problems

Somehow, '*' did not work for me, so I picked UI element names using DOM inspector and added to the wiki page.

[[ Bumping this old thread because It is returned on google's first page results. ]]