Very small fonts on 4K monitor [solved]

[jeremy ardley]

I recently upgraded my display to a 4K monitor.

I am running it with a new instance of Debian 12 under the Mate desktop,
though I think the problem happens with other desktops.

I had the immediate problem that most text was almost too small to view.
This occurred in many different applications and especially Google Chrome.

There are a variety of tweaks you can do to adjust the font sizes for
applications and for Mate defaults. None are really satisfactory and for
Google Chrome it was impossible to increase the microscopic size of the
text in the address bar and the size of the adjacent icons.

I did a fair bit of research and tried the various chrome 'cheats' but
with little or no  effect.

There is however an easy fix that I discovered. Ditch Nouveau!

I put in the Nvidia driver for my board and instantly almost all the
font problems were solved. In fact I had to go back and undo all the
font overrides I had in order to get an easily usable desktop.

This may well work with AMD graphics cards as well, but I've not tested it.


Jeremy

[Stefan Monnier]

> I recently upgraded my display to a 4K monitor.

[...]

> I had the immediate problem that most text was almost too small
> to view.

I think you'll want to read things like

https://wiki.debian.org/MonitorDPI


-- Stefan

[jeremy ardley]

On 1/7/23 10:27, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I think you'll want to read things like
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/MonitorDPI

That's a rather old reference and not particularly relevant to Debian 12
/ Bookworm, and certainly not relevant to Mate desktop. It also doesn't
fix the problem with Google Chrome where the font in the address bar is
microscopic as well as the icons on that line. That is something
specific to Google Chrome.

As an aside, a second side-effect of using the NVidia driver is an
increase in the width on window edges you can click when you are
dragging to resize.

Using the Nouveau driver and Mate the selection width was exactly 1
pixel and very difficult to click. ( Quite how the driver affects the
selection width is completely unclear to me ! )

With the Nvidia driver the edge selection is now sufficiently broad and
it's easy to resize windows.


Jeremy

[Stefan Monnier]

>> I think you'll want to read things like
>> https://wiki.debian.org/MonitorDPI
> That's a rather old reference and not particularly relevant to Debian 12 /

Sorry, the information I mean to convey is that your problem is probably
an incorrect DPI info (presumably one influenced by the display driver
since changing the driver affects the result).

E.g. you may want to compare the physical screen size that `xrandr`
announces with the real size of your monitor (and also comparing the
size you get with nouveau and the one you get with nvidia).


Stefan