Comment 67 for bug 310353

Please remember that attaching screenshots to show problems with the default font size is almost uselessly misleading, since anyone with a different DPI would view the screenshot at their own DPI rather than yours.

Rick, changing Gnome's font settings to use pixels would not make it "transparent to the user", because it would mean either (a) the visible numbers would fluctuate depending on what computer you'd logged in to (and often display awkward values like "13.333"), or (b) Gnome would no longer scale to the DPI at all, which would put Ubuntu at a serious disadvantage when proprietary competitors start using >150dpi displays routinely. (Web browsers use pixel-based preferences for arcane reasons that made a lot of sense in 1999 but that are making steadily less sense over time. They'll probably switch to points a few years after OSes do.)