Richard Owlett composed on 2016-10-19 12:51 (UTC-0500):
Jonathan Dowland wrote:
On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 09:22:00AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
It's not _quite_ an 'XY Problem'. The OP hath declared. <grin> It may be its first cousin. There is a not explicitly stated solution constraint. In my case I wish to use default resolution of current driver/monitor combination. I install to multiple machine/monitor permutations.
This is an interesting problem. You are right that changing GRUB's display resolution will not get consistent results across multiple machines (with different native/default resolutions, etc. -- and different screens with different DPIs)
However, the same is true for different font sizes. A system with a higher DPI will show the same size font physically smaller than another with a lower DPI.
The ideal solution would be the ability to specify desired font size in points. I've not decided on an attainable approximate metric.
I seriously doubt you'll find any support for the display density dependence required to use the physical unit that is pt from the kernel.
Sizing objects in most computing contexts is geared more heavily to pixels now than ever before. The concept of WYSIWYG is in atrophy outside of word processing environments. When one sees a number associated with text size in a computing environment one can generally only guess whether it means px or pt or something else altogether.
Browser makers several years ago dispensed with all physical units in a screen context, arbitrarily making the pt unit exactly equal to the px unit in order to reduce unexpected behavior from incompetently styled web pages, keeping physical units only for a printing context.
What you're attempting to do I don't even try. All my machines are multiboot. I deal with boot menu text size simply by making it big without much regard to the display to be used or its native resolution. And, I do it with Grub Legacy and Gfxboot (both from openSUSE), which I install myself and manage myself, and keep in a primary partition that never gets mounted to /boot. Gfxboot can be configured to display the selected stanza's kernel cmdline automatically. On each, I include the most common parameters affecting framebuffer configuration at or near the end of the line. If the last listed is suitable for the display, I simply hit enter. If not, it's ready to edit with a minimum of keystrokes. I find with the text sizes I prefer on a full (framebuffer) screen that native screen resolution is a non-issue, so nearly always use one that is lower than native except running Xorg.
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