Re: XWin: Tiny fonts on high resolution display

[Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com>]

----- Original Message -----
| From: "Ken Brown" <kbrown@cornell.edu>
| To: "Thomas Dickey" <dickey@his.com>
| Cc: "cygwin" <cygwin@cygwin.com>
| Sent: Friday, September 28, 2018 10:25:17 PM
| Subject: Re: XWin: Tiny fonts on high resolution display

| On 9/28/2018 8:06 PM, Thomas Dickey wrote:
|> ----- Original Message -----
|> | From: "Ken Brown" <kbrown@cornell.edu>
|> | To: "cygwin" <cygwin@cygwin.com>
|> | Sent: Friday, September 28, 2018 6:32:25 PM
|> | Subject: XWin: Tiny fonts on high resolution display
|> 
|> | A Google search shows that this is a very frequently asked question (e.g.,
|> | https://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2016-07/msg00247.html), but I haven't found a
|> | good answer, except perhaps to use Gnome or some other desktop environment.  (I
|> | haven't tried that yet.)
|> |
|> | I just got a new laptop with a 3840x2160 display.  When I start the X server via
|> | startxwin, xterm and emacs open small windows with tiny fonts.  Here are the
|> | xterm and emacs settings in my .Xresources:
|> 
|> But none of those are for fonts.  With bitmap fonts, you generally can use 10x20
|> (12x24 is not so good).  Otherwise, your choice would be a TrueType font (which
|> generally have poor coverage of Unicode -- a problem since xterm loads only one
|> font).
|> If you don't need to read CJKV, that's okay though...
|> 
|> With TrueType fonts, you can scale it:
|> 
|> https://invisible-island.net/xterm/manpage/xterm.html#VT100-Widget-Resources:faceSize
| 
| Thanks.  The 10x20 font was still too small, but I was able to get a reasonable
| xterm by adding
| 
|   XTerm*faceName: Lucida Console
|   XTerm*faceSize: 24
| 
| to .Xresources.  The only remaining problem is that the menus are still tiny.  I
| saw https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#tiny_menus, so I changed
| 'XTerm*geometry:  80x45' to 'XTerm.VT100.geometry:  80x45'.  But that didn't
| help.  Do you know how I can fix the menu fonts?

well, you cannot fix those using TrueType fonts, but since those use only ASCII,
the poor coverage for 12x24 (the largest bitmap font that I recall) would not
be a problem.

(I can work out a suitable resource pattern for that, if you need it).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net

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