Bug 184213

Summary:	font size selection in greeter login very peculiar
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Thomas Horsley <tom.horsley>
Component:	GNOME	Assignee:	Federico Mena Quintero <federico>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Minor
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	forgotten_eMaNecxqli, suse-beta
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.1
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Thomas Horsley 2006-06-12 21:49:35 UTC

I've just installed my new 42" HD monitor with 1920x1080 native resolution.

If I correctly describe the dimentions of the monitor (930x520), the font
which the login screen comes up with seems to be somewhere around 5 pixels
high.

If I tell it the physical dimensions are something more like half the actual
size, the fonts actually show up readable.

This appears to be unique to the greeter window. I haven't noticed
any microscopic fonts selected by default in other apps once I login.

My theory is that there is a multiply that should be a divide or something
like that somewhere in the bowels of the greeter code that is chosing fonts.

Anyone know if there is some way to override the greeter fonts manually?

As a point of reference, the login screen on fedora core 5 in a separate
partition on the same machine with the same physical monitor description
in the xorg.conf file does not have this problem - I can read the
login name fine as I type there.

Comment 1 JP Rosevear 2006-06-13 14:06:11 UTC

First Thomas, I wish i had a monitor like that.

Second, could you clarify for me the 930x520 measurement vs the 1920x1080 monitor size measurements you state?  Is this a case of tv measurement vs computer monitor output?

Comment 2 Thomas Horsley 2006-06-13 14:20:49 UTC

Yea, I guess I wasn't very clear - the 930x520 is the size in millimeters
that I tell it in the DisplaySize setting under the Monitor section in
the xorg.conf file.

The 1920x1080 is the number of pixels.

If I lie to it and tell it the physical dimension is much smaller than 930x520
(but still set to 1920x1080 pixels) then the font gets big enough to read.

I'd make a sample screen dump, but I have no idea how to take a screen dump
of the login screen (maybe it is possible to ssh in from somewhere else
and run a screen dump tool pointing it to :0.0?).

Comment 3 JP Rosevear 2006-06-13 23:03:53 UTC

HPJ, where does gdm get its intial font/dpi settings from?

Comment 4 Hans Petter Jansson 2006-06-20 00:05:58 UTC

I think this happens because we specify a 9-point font for our "industrial" GDM theme entries. A 9-point font would likely be unreadable on a low-DPI screen like that.

From the Industrial theme:

<item type="entry" id="user-pw-entry">
  <normal color="#000000" font="Sans 9"/>
  <pos anchor="nw" x="6" y="1" height="-1" width="-8"/>
</item>

The other themes generally specify 12-point fonts for this. How do they look?

Comment 5 Hans Petter Jansson 2006-06-20 00:07:43 UTC

Also see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164822 .

Comment 6 Thomas Horsley 2006-06-20 12:46:13 UTC

I'm sure I could find it if I poke around enough, but is there a simple
way to change the greeter theme somwhere so I can try others and see how
they look?

Comment 7 Thomas Horsley 2006-06-21 00:03:39 UTC

OK. I found the System>Configuration>Login Screen app, and played with
it some, but if I am reading xml correctly (highly doubtful), something
far more mysterious is going on.

All the labels for things like Restart and Session also have font sizes
specified in the 10 or 11 range, so they should just be a bit bigger than
the login size of 9, but the labels are all relatively large and perfectly
readable. The text I type for user name is microscopic in comparison.
Also the text that comes up in the popup for things like "Session" is the
same microscopic size as the text typed in the login prompt area.

For grins I tried editing the novell.xml file and changed the Sans 9
you show above to Sans 14, yet the font appeared unchanged. The same
microscopic text appeared.

I also tried the other themes, and "Happy Gnome" might have text just
a pixel or so bigger than industrial, but it is still microscopic compared
to all the labels on the login screen.

Comment 8 Forgotten User eMaNecxqli 2006-09-20 02:41:09 UTC

I have a Multi-sync E1100 CRT (21inch)Monitor attached to an Intel 945 video interface. I can and have set font sizes via the menus (to 12 pitch for all), as 10 pitch was too small.

For ease or reading, I lowered the default resolution to 1024 x 768 from the higher one (1152 by x).  In the logon screens and in any panel where I have to enter data, the font in the data input fields are echoed back at about 5 pixals. In fact, KDE is not usable because of that tiny display and data input size. I need a magnifying glass to really feel good.
PS my monitor can go up to 1900 by x in size, How do we get the system font size to match the screen resolution chosen? 
 

I do not know if forcing a different monitor type would help.

Comment 9 JP Rosevear 2007-02-14 21:12:04 UTC

Federico, is this covered by the DPI work?

Comment 10 Federico Mena Quintero 2007-02-15 01:45:52 UTC

GDM needs to:

1. Include a sanity check for the DPI similar to the one we put in gnome-settings-daemon for bug #240246.

2. Really, forget about point sizes and pick a reasonable size.  GDM has the whole screen available to itself; using a tiny 9-point font is just wrong :)  It should do something like measuring its longest string and making it fit to 3/4 of the screen.

Comment 11 Federico Mena Quintero 2007-10-30 01:36:07 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 168189 ***