Comment 86 for bug 310353

The title of this bug should be reworded.

I have a 44 DPI 50" 1080 HDTV running lucid and there are some fonts so small it's crippling. Specifically in Log File Viewer, and the terminal output in Synaptic Package Manager. I have fixed Log File Viewer by manually changing some of the font sizes in /var/lib/gconf/defaults/%gconf-tree.xml, but this is not something a normal person will want to do, and the terminal output in Synaptic Package Manager is still exceedingly small.

Gnome's Appearance font settings do not allow me to go any lower than 50. Setting the /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi gconf key to 44 has really done wonders for display quality except it seems certain sudo'd processes are not aware of the changes I've made in font settings. I know 44 DPI is very low for today's desktop monitors and such, but it makes for an excellent big screen TV. Shouldn't I be able to set this to 44 if that's what my monitor has? If a monitor is not correctly detected by X there should be a user alert/simple DPI config.

Having the correct DPI should not be for advanced users or only those who've got correctly detected monitors.

Lowering the default for the lowest DPI setting would be a good:

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/xsettings/gsd-xsettings-manager.c

/* X servers sometimes lie about the screen's physical dimensions, so we
cannot
* compute an accurate DPI value. When this happens, the user gets fonts that
 * are too huge or too tiny. So, we see what the server returns: if it reports
 * something outside of the range [DPI_LOW_REASONABLE_VALUE,
 * DPI_HIGH_REASONABLE_VALUE], then we assume that it is lying and we use
 * DPI_FALLBACK instead.
 *
 * See get_dpi_from_gconf_or_server() below, and also
 * https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=217790
 */
#define DPI_FALLBACK 96
#define DPI_LOW_REASONABLE_VALUE 50
#define DPI_HIGH_REASONABLE_VALUE 500

I just noticed that Ubuntu Software Center also ends up with extremely small fonts in the main viewing area while viewing application details and at the beginning with the icons.

Thank you very much/I don't mean to complain. :-)