#9324 NORM 1.5-ATe: Small fonts in Sugar and GNOME

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#9324: Small fonts in Sugar and GNOME
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           Reporter:  cjb           |       Owner:  dsd          
               Type:  defect        |      Status:  new          
           Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  1.5-ATest    
          Component:  not assigned  |     Version:  not specified
         Resolution:                |    Keywords:               
        Next_action:  diagnose      |    Verified:  0            
Deployment_affected:                |   Blockedby:               
           Blocking:                |  
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Comment(by dsd):

 Yay for 6 bugs, horribly intertwined.

 1. XO-1.5 detects screen resolution wrong, results in a value of 96 DPI
 being used in any scenario where it is calculated automatically.
 See #9331.

 2. There's a bug in olpc-desktop.ks, which tries to set a default DPI of
 120 in gconf. It sets it as an int, but the type of this field is float.
 When interpreted as float by gnome-settings-daemon, it has value 0.0.
 gnome-settings-daemon doesn't like such low values, so it bumps it up to
 the lowest value that it likes, which is 50.0. So we end up with dpi=50 in
 GNOME which is not what we want at all.

 But why are we trying to set DPI to 120 at all? The DPI of our display is
 201. Let's not mess with the truth.

 Fixed in fedora-xo git:
  * For XO-1, DPI is correctly detected as 201, so I removed the hack.
  * For XO-1.5, I fixed the hack to use type=float value=201. We'll remove
 this when (1) is fixed. This will fix GNOME for the time being. For sugar,
 I added a hack to create /home/olpc/.Xresources to set Xft.dpi=201. We'll
 remove this when (1) is fixed.

 3. Fonts generally look a bit different because we don't have the same
 packages that we did on 8.2.

 Fixed in fedora-xo for XO-1 and XO-1.5 by adding these packages: dejavu-
 lgc-sans-fonts dejavu-lgc-sans-mono-fonts dejavu-lgc-serif-fonts

 4. With 201 DPI, fonts in GNOME (with default sizes) look too big on the
 XO. However, 201 DPI is the true resolution of the screen. Things looking
 too big is a matter of human perception -- I measured with a ruler, and a
 character rendered at a certain point size on the XO (set with 201DPI) is
 exactly the same size (in physical millimetres) as the same character at
 the same size on my 96DPI 19" TFT monitor. This is how it's supposed to
 behave.

 201 is the DPI of the screen therefore I don't think we should be hacking
 the DPI value to be something different.

 The opposite problem is found on laptops that have huge screens - the
 fonts appear too small, even though they are being rendered on all screen
 sizes at the same physical size. A solution has been proposed which might
 help our case too:
 http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=102

 For now, I think the reality is that we just want to use smaller font
 sizes than most other systems.

 5. And Sugar-0.82 did exacty this, with an XO-specific profile which used
 size 7 fonts rather than size 10. That profile is now gone, so after
 fixing the DPI, things feel a bit big.

 Filed as http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/954

 6. gdm is misbehaving. In the gdm environment, it tries to use a DPI of 0,
 but whatever, the fonts look OK in gdm. When it launches GNOME, GNOME
 launches gnome-settings-daemon which kicks in with has working
 autodetection for XO-1, and the hack in (2) for XO-1.5. Yay.
 But when gdm launches sugar, a DPI value of 96 is set (even on XO-1, so
 its not the result of autodetection) as shown by xrdb -query. No idea why.
 I blame something in the gdm path because it works OK (no value is set,
 hence we use autodetection) when sugar is launched directly with xinit.

 Not going to investigate this right now: The .Xresources hack works around
 this for XO-1.5, and it seems likely that we'll move away from gdm as in
 #9330.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9324#comment:4>
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