# Increasing font size



## Poincare (Jul 18, 2009)

I installed xorg and it working great except for one very crucial thing. The font size is miniscule. My eyes have almost popped out trying to read the letters! Any tips on how to increase the font size?


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## aragon (Jul 18, 2009)

It would be helpful if you tell us what window manager and/or desktop environment you're running.


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## phoenix (Jul 18, 2009)

Also, what size of monitor, and what screen resolution you are using.

Most likely, all you need to do is change the DPI settings in X to match the real dimensions of your monitor/resolution.


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## setti (Jul 18, 2009)

Yah great question, I want also know how can we increase font. Actually I am under freebsd 7.1 release that running X11R6 + motif WM.

Best regards


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## aragon (Jul 18, 2009)

It's a fairly open ended question.  Different X11 toolkits, Window managers, and applications handle fonts differently.  For example, with GTK 2 the default font can be set in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 as follows:


```
gtk-font-name="Tahoma 8"
```

Which would set the default font to Tahoma at 8pt size.  Only GTK apps would follow that, and a GTK theme might override it.

In Firefox, you can setup your fonts in Preferences/Content.

In desktop environments like Gnome and KDE there'll be a control panel app that lets you specify this.

There are ways of creating overrides low down in the font rendering engine by setting up fonts.conf appropriately.  See fonts-conf(5) for more information.

Unfortunately I can't help with Motif.


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## Poincare (Jul 18, 2009)

I don't have a window manager or desktop manager. Just xorg to open firefox and wireshark. I think my monitor is 19'' but I can't be sure since I bought from a yard sale and I never got a handbook or anything.


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## vermaden (Jul 18, 2009)

Poincare said:
			
		

> Just xorg to open firefox and wireshark.



Type *about:config* in Firefox address bar and search for DPI setting, I use 75/72, but if you need bigger sizes try increasing it to something like 96.

Also you can select default X11 DPI by starting it like that: *xinit -- -dpi 75*


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## Poincare (Jul 18, 2009)

vermaden said:
			
		

> Type *about:config* in Firefox address bar and search for DPI setting, I use 75/72, but if you need bigger sizes try increasing it to something like 96.
> 
> Also you can select default X11 DPI by starting it like that: *xinit -- -dpi 75*



What about xterm? Those fonts are reeeealy small.


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## aragon (Jul 18, 2009)

Poincare said:
			
		

> What about xterm? Those fonts are reeeealy small.


xterm is configured via Xresources.  Add something like this to your ~/.Xdefaults:


```
xterm*faceName: Monospace:size=10
```


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