Re: XWin: Tiny fonts on high resolution display

[Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSw.ab.ca>]

On 2018-09-28 20:25, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 9/28/2018 8:06 PM, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>> On Friday, September 28, 2018 6:32:25 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
>>> 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).

DejaVu Sans Mono has pretty good UTF-8 glyph coverage and is regularly updated:
DejaVu has been my font family of choice everywhere for a few years.
The Unicode Font Resources page has other font suggestions with higher glyph
counts, but most are not as readable, especially for developer content.
Windows font linking allows fallback fonts to be used where glyphs are missing.

>> 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?

If you are having problems getting apps to display e.g. 10pt fonts looking like
10pt, 8pt etc., you might want to try Windows Settings/Display/Scaling designed
to help with app high res display issues.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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