Hello, Recently I took it upon myself to adjust KDE's default fonts in the 3.4 packages targeted at post-Sarge, to make KDE more pleasant and usable "out of the box." I picked as a default size 10 points, which is same default size as used by GTK2, and on any reasonably modern display yields very readable text. However, I promptly received a number of complaints from users who found that these fonts were too small. Most, it turns out, launch KDE using a display manager, such as kdm, that does not force a certain dpi (as in xdm's 100 dpi default), and moreover for whatever reason X failed to calculate their display's true dpi, causing it to set the fallback dpi of 75. Had the correct dpi been set, most of these users would not have had an issue. More to my point, had X fallen back to a better default value, they would not have had an issue either. X's antiquated fallback of 75 dpi is thus something of an obstacle for packagers who wish to pick sensible defaults, and make Debian "just work" for most users, since we are pressured to provide defaults that work at 75 dpi, which are far too large for users of modern, properly setup displays. GNOME, interestingly, runs a settings daemon that by default sets 96 dpi for fonts on all displays. KDE does no such thing, however. To ameliorate this issue, I urge that immediately post-Sarge (pre-Sarge would be ideal, but I'd understand), whether debconf is reformed or not, Debian's X be altered to fall back to 96 dpi. Though a -softdpi switch might be nice, since both -softdpi and the current hardcoded value are fallbacks in case auto-calculation fails, from the standpoint of the end user, they are indistinguishable. True, -softdpi's fallback value could be altered, whereas what I'm proposing is to change the build-time default, but if the user needed to alter -softdpi, then they could just as easily set -dpi and get the same result. Display managers such as kdm would also have to be patched to set -softdpi. Thus while -softdpi would solve the problem, I don't think such a special switch would be worth the effort; simply changing X's fallback should be sufficient. Once this is done, and perhaps when debconf gets better at helping users set good defaults in this area, xdm/startx's forcing of 100 dpi should also be dropped (I'm in the "drop it now" camp, but I imagine that the simple addition of my name to the list won't sway you...). Why pick 96 dpi instead of 100 dpi? Obviously for a fallback the difference is not one of the utmost importance, but I feel that 96 would be better, for reasons outlined at http://scanline.ca/dpi/index.html, though there may be reasons to use 100 dpi that I'm not aware of, here in my pure TrueType world. That site makes the further proposal that X set a default system-wide Xft font default of 96 dpi; I find the idea appealing, but I realize that many people would object to it, using arguments not without merit, and so I won't push for such a change today. Thanks, Christopher Martin Please CC me on all replies and follow-ups. I'm not subscribed to debian-x.
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