Bug 105072

Summary: Hard coded font sizes make kcontrol unreadable.
Product: [Unmaintained] kcontrol Reporter: Dylan Griffiths <dylang>
Component: generalAssignee: Daniel Molkentin <molkentin>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: normal CC: finex, thiago
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Slackware   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments: A screenshot contrasting the size of the fonts.

Description Dylan Griffiths 2005-05-04 08:13:13 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.4.0)
Installed from:    Slackware Packages
Compiler:          gcc 3.4.3 64-bit
OS:                Linux

In the font dialog in kcontrol, I can set all the system font sizes: general, fixed-width, menu, titlebar, etc.  They can all be easily made larger, and the results are immediate.

The trouble I'm running into are all the little spots where some programmer has hard coded a size; this includes all the info windows in the kcontrol program!  Attached is a jpg showing how ridiculously small the info fonts are compared to the normal ones (they must be 8 or 10pt, which is unreadable at 1600x1200).  If you're viewing on a low resolution (1024x768 or lower) screen, just scale the image by 50-75% in The Gimp to see how bad it really is :/
Comment 1 Dylan Griffiths 2005-05-04 08:13:59 UTC 
Created attachment 10888 [details]
A screenshot contrasting the size of the fonts.
Comment 2 Thiago Macieira 2005-05-04 16:21:51 UTC 
10pt should be 3.5mm in height. Can you check if the size is correct?
Comment 3 Dylan Griffiths 2005-05-04 16:42:04 UTC 
On my screen, the font I'm complaining about is the thickness of a Canadian penny (should be the same thickness as a US penny, nickel, possibly quarter; only the dime is thinner than the text height).  I don't have a ruler handy, but that's pretty much unreadable.
Comment 4 Thiago Macieira 2005-05-04 16:50:08 UTC 
That sounds awfully small, which might indicate your monitor is not properly set up.

What is your monitor size? And your DPI setting (xdpyinfo | grep dots)?
Comment 5 Dylan Griffiths 2005-05-04 16:52:51 UTC 
This is a 19" (18" viewable) monitor at 1600x1200 75Hz.
  xdpyinfo | grep dots gives: 
resolution:    112x112 dots per inch

All the fonts I set to 20-24 pt are readable and fine, but not everything seems to respect that I've turned my font sizes up, thus the bug report.  Look at the screen shot and contrast the one font size with the other; I have all font sizes turned way up in kcontrol, yet TINY fonts still persist!
Comment 6 Thiago Macieira 2005-05-04 17:08:02 UTC 
DPI setting is correct: 18" viewable diagonally -> 14.4" horizontally. 1600 / 14.4 = 111.1 pixels per inch.

Which makes me wonder how it got that small... KDE does respect the DPI setting, unlike some other X programs. Can you use KRuler and measure a 72pt font? It should be 112 pixels in height.

In any event, I think the info pages are HTML rendered. Can you check your Konqueror font sizes as well?
Comment 7 Dylan Griffiths 2005-05-05 05:36:20 UTC 
I don't see how this is helping, but I'll tell you what I found.  The C in that image is 7 pixels by 14 pixels.  The capital A in Arial at 72 (maybe, I couldn't select anything larger than 64pt) was 76x81 pixels.  Konq's min font size is 14, regular is 16.  Webpages don't look like that in Konq; they use a font that's about 1.5 times as big.
Comment 8 Thiago Macieira 2005-05-05 05:45:16 UTC 
Your DPI settings are correct but the fonts are too small. I don't think this is a kcontrol problem: it is probably deeper.
Comment 9 Dylan Griffiths 2005-05-07 03:30:27 UTC 
What do you suggest I do, then?
Comment 10 FiNeX 2008-11-11 22:23:49 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 101730 ***