GTK Fonts are too big

Question

My GTK fonts are very big. When I want them to look good I have to set the size to 7. But I think this is very low and not the solution. I think it should be around 12. 7 sounds like a workaround to me. Or not?

Here you can see the good looking configuration with size 7:

And here is the very big configuration with size 12:

The problem I have is, that even if I set the size to 7 there are some programs that still display big fonts. For example, eclipse has good looking menues, but the font in the editor still is very big (but set to 10)!

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Update: I have a 14 inch screen with 1600x900 pixels. According to pxcalc.com my DPI should be set to 131.13. So this looks good too.

$ xdpyinfo | grep -B2 resolution
screen #0:
  dimensions:    1600x900 pixels (310x170 millimeters)
  resolution:    131x134 dots per inch

Solution 1

As mentioned in the a comment: I was not able to change the DPI, so I removed the nvidia-driver and replaced it with the nouveau-driver. Now everything's fine.

Solution 2

Something you can use in command-line and when scripting: reset DPI using xrandr:

xrandr --dpi 96

Solution 3

Change the display DPI to a lower value.

Comments

[iglvzx]

Did you manually change the DPI? A DPI of 131 is not normal. You should stick to the standard DPIs of 72, 96, or 120.

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

The DPI is used to make the size in points match reality. There are 72 points per inch, so at 131 DPI the fonts are going to be about twice the size in pixels.

[iglvzx]

@EthanLeroy Does changing the DPI have any effect?

[Ethan Leroy]

Thanks again! When I tried to change the DPI with xrandr I got an error telling something about failed to get size of gamma for output default. My solution is quite simple: I removed the nvidia driver and installed the nouveau driver. Everything looks better now :-)

[Joshua Taylor]

I found that after I changed the DPI with xrandr (as suggested in @progo 's answer), I had to restart the affected applications.

[Joshua Taylor]

This worked for me, but it may be worth mentioning that this will probably require restarting the applications; it's not enough to just run xrand --dpi n.