Why is a ten point font smaller in Debian compared to Ubuntu?

Question

I use Debian 7.7.0 and my ~/.Xresources file contains

Xft.antialias: true
Xft.autohint: false
Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.rgba: rgb

(These are the settings I used in Ubuntu 14.04 to maintain the same font rendering when using a simple window manager started from the console.)

The system font is set to DejaVu Sans at ten points and the word "File" is rendered like this:

Font rendering in Debian

With the same settings in Ubuntu 14.04 each letter is one pixel higher:

Font rendering in Ubuntu

Since each letter has the same width in both cases the rendering in Debian looks vertically squashed.

I'm pretty sure those settings don't do anything because they only apply to the old X11 font server, which nobody uses anymore. Also applications don't request a font size of 10 pixels... they request 10 ( or whatever ) point, which is 10/72nds of an inch. That size gets translated to a number of pixels based on the dpi of the screen. — psusi, Oct 31, 2014 at 15:38
@psusi The settings surely affect the font rendering and supports more applications than fontconfig do, at least in my case where I start a window manager from the console. Thanks for teaching be about the units, I thought the requested unit was pixels. — August Karlstrom, Oct 31, 2014 at 17:14

August Karlstrom · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-31 17:46:35Z

3

Changing Xft.dpi from 96 to 100 solved the problem for me. Now the letters have the same shape as in Ubuntu.

answered Oct 31, 2014 at 17:46

August Karlstrom

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