A couple of years ago when everyone still had giant CRT monitors, resolutions of 1600x1200 were pretty common. Nowadays however 19" TFT monitors often cannot scale higher than 1280x1024. So how can we still fit more on one screen? DPI can help!

About this article

Though you might not really need the biggest resolutions, sometimes it would be nice to be able to fit more on your screen. There's a trick in Gnome to achieve this using the font Dots Per Inch settings. I use Ubuntu but it should work on every Linux distribution with Gnome installed.

In this article we're not really going to change the resolution, in fact we're going to change the font rendering details, making every letter a little smaller, thus resulting in more space everywhere.

How to change

Click on the: System -> Preferences -> Font menu

Click on the Details button. This will open up Font Rendering Details

Now you can change the DPI setting. The default is 96 which is pretty big in my opinion. I finally chose 72, but feel free to experiment like this:

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I did an upgrade to Gutsy two months ago, but Feisty works exactly the same, the only difference is that Gutsy has a: System -> Preferences -> Appearance menu, with a Font tab.