Speaking of fonts...

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Tom Horsley wrote:

> I think I know what the real problem is with getting good font
> display by default. There isn't enough information in the
> xorg.conf file to scale the fonts properly. It came to me
> when thinking about this, that the bigger your monitor, the
> farther back you tend to sit.
>
> The algorithms rampant in the various font systems on linux
> seem to scale based on a linear algorithm considering
> only dots per inch, and not taking into account how far
> away from the monitor you probably sit.
>
> This didn't seem like it could be an original thought, so
> I did a little web searching and found this:
>
> http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb02.asp
>
> As the author points out, what you want is for the font to
> subtend the same angle to be the same apparent point size.
>
> We either need xorg.conf to include a new DistanceFromMonitor
> parameter that can be factored into the font scaling, or
> we just need the scalaing algorithms to use a heuristic that
> guesses you are likely to be sitting farther away the larger
> your monitor is (or both - it might be nice to have a relatively
> small monitor, but inform X you are gonna be looking at it
> from across the room, so it needs to scale the fonts way up,
> so a heuristic wouldn't necessarily always work, but could be
> a good default).

One thing I find helps is correctly setting DPI in the font configuration 
screen.  There is other good advice collected at 
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc5_setup.shtml.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs