Arch Linux

qpeg

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 4

[SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

I've just installed Arch following the instructions in the wiki and everything has gone smoothly so far. But I now have a problem with KDE (kde-meta) - all the text on screen is unreadable, resembling squares. I thought it might be something to do with the locale setting so I set it back to the default en_US, but that had no effect.

Not sure what extra info I can give, I haven't done anything exotic during the install.

Fonts installed are ms, bitstream vera and deja vu.

Last edited by qpeg (2010-06-25 12:22:05)

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: [SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

If the "squares" are tiny, then it's probably a wrong DPI setting I'd say.

x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: [SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

@ qpeg, maybe it has something to do with pango. take a look at this thread:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=51316

qpeg

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

Thanks for the replies.

I should have been clearer - its small square dots. It does seem to be a dpi issue. I tried putting "ServerArgsLocal =-dpi 96" (without quotes) in the kdm config, but that makes no difference. Ditto if I use "startx -dpi 96" to start KDE.

Gnome doesn't have the same issue and looks fine.

gnumdk

Member

Registered: 2009-10-15

Posts: 175

Re: [SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

pacman -S ttf-dejavu  ttf-liberation ttf-freefont ?

qpeg

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

(Mostly) fixed. I tried using the nv driver instead of nvidia and everything looked fine. Now that I was able to actually read the screen I found a force dpi option in KDE's font settings. This fixes the DPI issue with the nvidia driver.

This doesn't cover KDM though, which is still unreadable. As I said before "ServerArgsLocal=-96 dpi" within KDM's config does nothing. Any ideas?

qpeg

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] KDE fonts unreadably small

Fixed.

Added the following to the Device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf

Option "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
Option "DPI" "96 x 96"