GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 129271
Take font (DPI) settings from Monitor
Last modified: 2005-07-14 17:56:08 UTC
This is a wishlist item really, but one that has already been shellscripted to work. Currently I have a shared NFS /home, but when changing machine, you get font dpi settings stored in gconf, instead of using the settings from the monitors. I've worked around this to get a coherent look&feel between monitors by doing a gnome session script that reads xdpyinfo, catches dpi and sets it into gconf. Suggestions/Wishlist: on a clean session (no gconf settings stored about it in the past) grab dpi info from the monitor. In a modern setup its most likely to be correct, in an older one, either the sysadmin has corrected it by setting the monitor size, or it will be at a 75/100 dpi default. An option to automatically take DPI info from the monitor at each startup. This can be hidden in gconf if need be, but it'd make things easier in a networked environment.
This is an enhancement, isn't it?
yep it is
I'd like to see this as well. Here is my setup: two permanent systems, both running Slackware Linux desktop: 19" monitor, at 1600x1200 (105 DPI) laptop: 13" (I think, doesn't really matter) at 800x600 (87 DPI) The laptop is old and slow (100 MHz Pentium), and the desktop is new and fast (2 GHz Athlon). However, the desktop system has an uncomfortable chair, so I prefer to sit on the couch with the laptop. Hence, I use the X server on the slow laptop, and my client programs run on the fast desktop. The classic X setup. Having two different DPI settings doesn't work well in GNOME. Even with unsetting the /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi key, it defaults to 96 DPI, which doesn't match either of my systems. The ideal solution for me, would be to get the DPI from the X server, if possible. I'm sure other, more capable people would be able to implement this in a reasonable manner, but I would probably do one of the following: get a Boolean flag in GConf if flag is set: get DPI from server otherwise: get DPI from GConf OR change the /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi key type to "string", which would allow: get DPI value if it's a numeric string: use as DPI value otherwise: get DPI from X server I see that this is almost a year old, and hasn't been touched in 11 months. However, I am looking at the possibility of deploying X-based desktops where I work, and this would be a super plus for us as users, and for myself as the admin. (I see a lot of discussion at Bug 104341, and it's probably pertinent to this. However, that seems more of a bug report, and this one is an enhancement request.)
Comment #27 in bug 104341 is a pretty accurate description of why using the actual monitor DPI is not a good idea. There is a legitimate argument that you might want different DPI on different systems sharing the same homedir, but there is no real connection to the DPI of the monitor. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 104341 ***