This has been puzzling me for some time and despite bothering Auntie Google rather a lot, I've yet to find a satisfying answer.
As an old-time (since 1981) unix and X guy, I've generally been fairly well-able to get fonts to behave in a rational manner. My needs are pretty simple - I just want 8-point (or 9-point etc) fonts to appear on the screen as 8-point font - ie more or less 8 * 1/72 inches = 2.82mm high. More or less, I'm not insisting it be exact, but at least not 1mm or 5mm high.
In the (glorious) past I was able to look at xdpyinfo |egrep 'dimension| resolution' and check that Xorg was giving something reasonable.. eg dimensions: 1600x1200 pixels (423x317 millimeters) resolution: 96x96 dots per inch
So far so good. With this new fangled gnome and fontconfig stuff, you also need to set up some X-resources with:
xrdb -query |grep Xft Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintfull Xft.rgba: none
... and to inform gnome-settings-daemon with
gnome-appearance-properties->Font->Details->dpi which is the same as:
gconftool-2 -s --type float /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi 96
It's that last step that bothers me - it's not "per display", so if I log in using a different X-server eg using VNC, I might well have a completely different dpi. For example, my home monitor is a good-old CRT with 152 dpi. I use 144 dpi as a multiple of 12 but if I log in through vnc without changing /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi, the fonts are just wrong, wrong, wrong.
If I then fix things up in that VNC session, when I come back to the physical monitor at 96 dpi, things are again wrong, until I fix it up again. But then the VNC session(s) are wrong.
My question is this - surely there's a way to tell gconf/gnome that my dpi setting is for DISPLAY X. Please tell me it's not just a global setting for all displays!!
Thanks
Bob