Best approach for unreadably small fonts on small high resolution screens?
 

I just installed Slackware-current 64 on my new Asus Zenbook UX21A last night (goodbye and good riddance, Windows 8!). This ultrabook has a 1920x1080 native resolution on an 11.6" screen, so of course everything is REALLY small.

To make my console fonts readable so I could set everything up, I appended "video=640x400" to the lilo config. That makes my eyes feel better, but I am not sure it is the *right* way to handle it.

Also, for inside X, I could go through and change the size of all the fonts, but is that also the appropriate way to deal with this? I am wondering if there is a better way I do not know about.

How are others dealing with issues like this on the newer small high resolution screens?

Any thoughts or information would be welcome.

Member Response
 

Hi,

Look at Dugan's homepage for some useful setup information/techniques.

EDIT: for fonts; http://duganchen.ca/writings/slackware/fonts/

Changing screen resolution to a non-native one is suboptimal, especially on LCD/TFT displays.
I'd recommend to install terminus-font and set the appropriate glyph size.
For console (set by KMS at boot process) in /etc/rc.d/rc.font like Take care

For X you need to first ensure it has the right dpi settings.

Handy section on X and dpi :-
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...y_Size_and_DPI

Handy calculator to work out your screen :- (yours is 190dpi which is extremely high)
http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html

Thanks, that is extremely helpful, especially the terminus-font and the dpi settings. I was thinking I needed to figure out the dpi, but I had no idea what to set it to. I put it at 190 and now everything is perfect!

Try "startx -dpi 120", where 120 is whatever font size you want. For reference, 96dpi is Windows standard. 120 is oversized.

Thanks Dugan. It looks like on my system I have to go even higher than 120. The 190 given by the above calculator works nicely.

Nice webpage, BTW. Very good overview of fonts in Slackware.