Disable all scaling and font question

zeinguteiw · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2016 Posts: 4

I am a new Gentoo user, about a week now. I have used Arch before and right now am coming from Ubuntu. I am running fluxbox for my WM. The scaling on my system seems all out of wack coming from Ubuntu, specifically with firefox. I have a 4k display (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KJGY3TO/). Firefox font, buttons, and cursor are huge. I modified layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to be 1, which from what I understand should give me no scaling. However, this only changes webpages, not the buttons, cursor, or font in menus. -1 is supposed to be use system defaults, which is what it was when it was all huge, which makes me think there is a setting somewhere doing some system wide scaling. I just want to turn off scaling altogether, I want everything displaying natively at 4k. How can I do this?

Also, I really liked gnome-terminal from ubuntu, but I don't want to run gnome. I am trying to make xterm look like that by using a similar font and size. Found some info online to set 'XTerm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono Bold:size=11' in .Xresources, which when I tested on Ubuntu worked as expected. When I try on my Gentoo system I get this weird huge font with massive spacing. After trying some other fonts, I get the same thing, which leads me to believe I am missing a font package or something. How can I remedy this?

zeinguteiw · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2016 Posts: 4

I figured out part of my problem. I compared my DPI to what Ubuntu was using, which was 96 x 96, whereas Gentoo was using 157 x 157. After switching to 96 x 96 things seemed to look more normal. What I don't understand is why this is the case.

1) The specs for my monitor say it is 157 x 157.
2) If I reduce the dpi, shouldn't things get bigger? A higher DPI means more pixels fit in a smaller space, so things should be generally smaller if each item drawn to the screen is a set number of pixels, why is this not the case?

Also, while this fixed buttons and texted, the cursor is still huge, I want to say like 5 times bigger than the system default. This only happens in firefox though, other programs keep the system default cursor.

netjiro · n00b Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 47 Location: Liechtenstein

Higher dpi means that each pixel is physically smaller, and thus buttons etc should be rendered "larger" i.e. using more pixels. So increasing dpi should make elements larger.
However, I've noticed that the scaling factor is way off for some reason. I have ca 180dpi native on my main monitor but that makes unusably large elements. Setting 110 or so is much better. It seems that 180dpi is much more than twice the size of 90 dpi, which is very strange in my opinion.