fontsize in 7.92

[Richi Plana]

On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 00:24 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le mardi 23 octobre 2007 à 00:01 -0400, Christoph Hoeger a écrit :
> 
> > is that sense-full? I mean, I've bought a Thinkpad R60 with a 1440x900
> > Display to see more information on my screen simultaneously 
> 
> If you want small fonts just lower the size in points of your fonts in
> your app preferences. Gnome font preferences use pt as unit. Till now
> the GNOME pt unit had no relation with the pt unit the rest of the world
> uses. Now it's the same, so if you want small fonts you need to actually
> configure small fonts and not change the unit meaning on your system
> (and likewise if you want big fonts).
> 
> That also means BTW that when you change laptop again your text will
> stay the same size regardless of the screen resolution, so you can
> invest the time to find good settings you'll keep them a long time.

I, for one, am glad that there's a move to make font sizes be based on
length rather than point sizes.

The selection of a default font size is still crap-shoot, at best.
Having the monitor DPI as a dependency now allows people to say "I want
fonts that are so-and-so millimeters in height", unfortunately, 1) we
still lack information like distance of the viewer from the screen and
the height of the screen relative to the viewer, and 2) we've no way to
guess what the user would want, anyway. There are a couple of
discussions on the most ergonomic distance between monitor and viewer,
but font size preference is pretty varied. The only way to find out is
to let the gnome desktop provide feedback (a'la Smolt) after the user
has customized the desktop to his/her preference. Perhaps than a norm
can be established.

Personally, I would like to set my font size preference in some length
unit of measure so that I can bump up the resolution and not have the
fonts and icons shrink to sizes I can hardly read. It's important for me
to see a lot more information on the screen, but not to the point where
it becomes useless because they're too small that I keep having to
squint. Believe me, straining ones eyesight like that will eventually
take its toll.
--

Richi Plana