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73416ba
(Get the code!)
Alexander, the problem is that the window and desktop font is set at 10px while other fonts are set as 13.333px. All is "px".
The result is that the text looks disproportioned between the application and the window title as can be seen in the last couple of screenshots. Worse - if you look at a nautilus window vs. icons on the desktop they look very different even though its the same application showing the same thing (files).
Moreover, I'd like to note that the text box I'm currently writing this text in is specified as having font sized at 10pt (not pixels) and I think (from my experience reading things on computer screens over the years) that Firefox renders it faithfully. If you'll look in the screenshot you'd notice that the text looks radically different then the one nautilus renders which is clearly way too big. However the text size in this text box pretty much matches up to the text size of the window title which is currently set (as by default) to "10" (whatever that is in the GNOME font properties dialog).
[Not that it matters, but this display is currently set to 86dpi by Ubuntu automatic DPI magic thing]
What I'm saying is that there are two major issues in this regression ticket:
1. GNOME defaults use two different font sizes: 10 and 13.333 for no apparent reason and it looks horrible.
2. Apparently most application on the GNOME desktop render the font as if the number was specified in points and not pixels, and as a result the font is rendered way too bit. On my desktop this currently includes Metacity and Nautilus, GNOME control-center applications and a few more.
Lastly, there seems to be a related problem with the font preferences dialog: when you first load it, the font sizes are specified as 13.333 (not for all, as noted) but when you want to change it there is no option for 13.333 to change it back. Worse - if you type 13.333 manually in the "font size" box and click "OK", the text in the application suddenly grows by 33%. So it looks like even the GNOME font properties dialog doesn't know that the font size is measured suddenly in pixels.
Font sizes in GNOME have always been in points and are still so in all applications (except perhaps those that were modified during this discussion) - why was this change suddenly introduced? it doesn't make any sense.