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Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu?

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On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 10:22:24AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
>On 10/18/2016 9:20 AM, Darac Marjal wrote:
>>On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 08:51:00AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
>>>With GRUB2 on Jessie, how do I increase the menu's font _size_ .
>>>A Google search wandered around my problem without addressing it.
>>>I did discover that that GRUB was using a resolution that
>>>matched my monitor's settings.
>>>
>>>[When menu comes up go to command mode by typing 'c'. Then
>>>enter 'vbeinfo' to see list of supported resolutions. In my
>>>case the active resolution was listed as 1280 x 1024.]
>>>
>>
>>You will need to convert a font of your choice to GRUB's pf2 format:
>>
>>     # grub-mkfont -o /boot/grub/fonts/example.pf2 -s 24
>>     /path/to/Example.ttf
>>
>>(adjust the names to reflect your chosen font. The parameter to
>>-s is the font size in pixels).
>>
>>Next up, tell grub that you want to use your new font. Add this
>>to /etc/default/grub:
>>
>>     GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/fonts/example.pf2
>>
>>Finally,
>>
>>     # update-grub
>
>
>I'm confused. We may be using the term "font" differently. The 
>existing font family is acceptable. I just wish to change size of 
>existing font.

As I understand it, Grub uses bitmap fonts. That is, each character on 
screen is a little picture. TrueType fonts, by contrast, are vector 
fonts: Each character describes the shape of the letter. TrueType fonts 
can be rescaled easily (actually, vector fonts must ALWAYS be scaled), 
but bitmap fonts either don't scale, or look terrible when scaled.

I suspect, in order to keep grub's already fairly bulky footprint down, 
the developers have elected NOT to put a full font-rendering engine in.  
Or rather, that's what grub-mkfont is: it pre-renders the font at a 
specified scale, allowing the bootloader to simply paste the images to 
screen when showing the menu.

Now, if you want to use the existing font, but render it at a different 
scale, then we need to look at what grub uses by default. Apparently, 
the default is "unicode.pf2". A bit of staring at the sourcecode 
(Makefile.am and configure.ac) tells me that this comes from either GNU 
Unifont or DejaVuSans.  Fortunately, they're bot available in debian 
(ttf-unifont and fonts-dejavu-core), so you should be able to re-render 
them at whatever size you like, and get an identical display, but 
larger.

-- 
For more information, please reread.

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Thread

Increase font size of GRUB menu? Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2016-10-18 16:00 +0200
  Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2016-10-18 16:30 +0200
    Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2016-10-18 17:30 +0200
      Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-10-18 18:30 +0200
      Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2016-10-18 18:40 +0200
      Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Anthony Baldwin <baldwinlinguas@gmx.com> - 2016-10-18 21:40 +0200
      Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-10-19 12:40 +0200
        Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-10-19 13:10 +0200
          Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2016-10-19 16:30 +0200
            Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-10-19 16:50 +0200
              Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2016-10-19 17:00 +0200
            Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-10-19 18:20 +0200
              Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2016-10-19 19:50 +0200
                Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-10-19 21:20 +0200
            Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> - 2016-10-19 18:40 +0200
              Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2016-10-19 20:00 +0200
                Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2016-10-19 20:30 +0200
                Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-10-19 20:50 +0200
  [MY solution] Re: Increase font size of GRUB menu? Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2016-10-22 17:40 +0200

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