On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 10:22:24AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
On 10/18/2016 9:20 AM, Darac Marjal wrote:On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 08:51:00AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:With GRUB2 on Jessie, how do I increase the menu's font _size_ . A Google search wandered around my problem without addressing it. I did discover that that GRUB was using a resolution that matched my monitor's settings. [When menu comes up go to command mode by typing 'c'. Then enter 'vbeinfo' to see list of supported resolutions. In my case the active resolution was listed as 1280 x 1024.]You will need to convert a font of your choice to GRUB's pf2 format: # grub-mkfont -o /boot/grub/fonts/example.pf2 -s 24 /path/to/Example.ttf (adjust the names to reflect your chosen font. The parameter to -s is the font size in pixels). Next up, tell grub that you want to use your new font. Add this to /etc/default/grub: GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/fonts/example.pf2 Finally, # update-grubI'm confused. We may be using the term "font" differently. The existing font family is acceptable. I just wish to change size of existing font.
As I understand it, Grub uses bitmap fonts. That is, each character on screen is a little picture. TrueType fonts, by contrast, are vector fonts: Each character describes the shape of the letter. TrueType fonts can be rescaled easily (actually, vector fonts must ALWAYS be scaled), but bitmap fonts either don't scale, or look terrible when scaled.
I suspect, in order to keep grub's already fairly bulky footprint down, the developers have elected NOT to put a full font-rendering engine in. Or rather, that's what grub-mkfont is: it pre-renders the font at a specified scale, allowing the bootloader to simply paste the images to screen when showing the menu.
Now, if you want to use the existing font, but render it at a different scale, then we need to look at what grub uses by default. Apparently, the default is "unicode.pf2". A bit of staring at the sourcecode (Makefile.am and configure.ac) tells me that this comes from either GNU Unifont or DejaVuSans. Fortunately, they're bot available in debian (ttf-unifont and fonts-dejavu-core), so you should be able to re-render them at whatever size you like, and get an identical display, but larger.
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