KDE Fonts Too Small... Display Problem?
 

I've been poking around on the web for a bit but have had no luck determining what has gone wrong with my system.

I rebooted due to a problem with one of my drives (used solely for storage) and, upon reaching the GUI login manager, found that KDE's fonts were all about 4 pitches smaller than they should be. The Control Center > Appearance & Themes > Fonts panel shows that all of my fonts are 12pt but they appear to be about 8pt. This is, as I'm sure you can guess, rather maddening.

Strangely enough, some applications do not seem to be affected. The menu bar of Firefox and the text which I am typing now seem to be fine. Firefox's text is okay. The KDE titlebar for Firefox, however, is much smaller than it should be. Fonts in GAIM are tiny. Java applications seem to be unaffected. The fonts inside of Konsole windows are fine, but Konqueror windows are hard to read.

I would assume this is a font problem, but I'm not certain. After all, the control buttons on my windows (minimize, restore, and close in the upper right) are smaller than they should be.

It has been a couple days since I rebooted my machine. In that time, I have changed very little having to do with the display system, if anything. I compiled the LAME encoder library, recompiled MPlayer, and installed a couple of Debian packages such as dvdbackup. I did not change the XF86Config file in any way.

Any suggestions or ideas?

Thanks for reading; cheers!

Hi,

Probably your font resolution is not set correctly. Please go to the fonts settings in the the KDE Control Centre. There should be somewhere a textbox where you set the font resolution. Try a lower resolution, e.g. 86.

(Sorry - I am using Gnome and therefore not entirely sure where to find the setting in the KDE Control Centre).

Hope that helps,

I tried looking that up just now and found the /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc file in which server options are stored (I think). It had a -dpi flag set to "100". I changed it to 85 and restarted the X server: no change. I removed it entirely: no change. In the interest of a test, I put it back to 100 and started Gnome (which happens to be on the machine but which I do not use). It launched fine; all of the fonts were 10pt and displayed like it. So either Gnome is doing something which fixes or overrides the X configuration or the configuration problem is KDE-specific.

More to follow, I'm sure. ;) Any ideas where I'd find a KDE-specific font resolution setting? I can't find it in kdmrc.

My KDE installation is back to the land of the visible. I edited the file "/etc/kde3/kdm/Xservers" and changed one line:
Hope this helps. ;)