OSNews

That is really poor resolution for such a large monitor.



Something is very wrong. You shouldn't have any problems with small text unless you're running really high resolutions, which you aren't.

In any case, if the DPI of your display is set properly, font size won't be a problem. Remember that pt is a physical size. So 8pt font size should be the same physical size on any screen if it is set up correctly.



You can force override that in any browser. Most webpages choose reasonable fonts though.



Your DPI is incorrect. In X, set the DisplaySize to the physical dimensions of your monitor (google for more info on how to do that).

Either that, or use FF3/Opera and use full page zoom to get bigger font sizes without breaking layouts.

a) It's the best compromise between size and crispness. I wouldn't want to know how all those tiny fonts web pages are so fond of look in higher resolutions

b) It's the highest resolution that allows 100Hz. I'm sensitive to flicker and probably the only person in the world who notices the difference between 85Hz and 100Hz







There are quite a few pages out there that use 0.7em and less or happily ignore your chosen font size altogether.



Unfortunately all kinds of things start to break in unexpected ways when you play around with DPI on Windows (e.g. buttons on .Net apps vanish, etc.), while Linux distros make it a game of hide and seek (Ubuntu sets a fixed dpi in the xserverrc, something that was done in Debian ironically enough to fix the problem of too-small fonts)



I do. Unfortunately it breaks the layout on a lot of pages.



Most people don't steal. I nevertheless lock my door because those that do ruin it for everybody else. The same with web pages.



That was Windows. I've written above why I don't change the dpi value there. In X the font sizes have more reasonable numbers, after I've searched my way through 4 config files to allow that DisplaySize value to actually work (aside from the xserverrc Nvidia also had a setting that by default overrode your chosen values). So it's not like Linux makes changing your DPI to the correct value easy. Beware of the Leopard.




But then I have to scroll sideways. What I want is a Firefox extension that pretends I'm on a 1024x768 display, layouts the page accordingly, then scales everything to 1280x1024 (refresh rate, remember? =) or 1600x1280 or whatever and renders the fonts at the final size.

I totally agree with leos, something is quite wrong with your monitor/system.

Unless you have sight problems (which would explain why you need low-resolution on a big display -- using a screen magnifier like xmag sucks terribly), things shouldn't go that wrong on your monitor. I had a 21" CRT myself (switched to a 22" LCD due to space and power consumption issues -- that beast took half of my desk and sucked more power than my computer itself). I used it in the largest resolution available (2048x1536) and didn't have any problem reading text. In fact, I don't have any problem now either -- but I'm in a lower resolution (1680x1050).

If you're under GTK, there's a known issues related to font sizes; or there used to be a while ago, just google for it. If fonts seem to small in general, try to see if, for some funky reason, your system isn't set up to use very small sizes.

I don't and I wanna keep it that way but I read on-screen quite a lot and large fonts are a way to do that. If I let web pages render the way their retar.. errr designers want them to then most just waste 80% of the screen size on a white space at the right or ads/5000 sidebars anyway.