Upon starting Kali Linux up, certain things may appear larger than expected. This could be because of DPI (Dots Per Inch) / PPI (Pixels Per Inch) being incorrect. If things are looking smaller than expected, you may wish to look at our HiDPI guide.

This could be happening for various reasons, such as the graphic card drivers and/or the monitor profile causing issues.

This guide will cover single screen setups. We do not have the hardware in order to test multiple display outputs to write up the guide. So we are looking for community contribution to help out. If you have the hardware, and expertise, please edit this guide!

Upon opening some applications, the font may appear larger than expected, like in the example below. Here you can see two different terminal software, the one on the left is using Qt (QTerminal) and the one on the right is using GTK (xfce4-terminal).

Qt is too large, and needs to be altered. First we need to find what value to alter it to, then we need to apply the change.

We first use xrdb, which looks up in the database of X server (X is what is sponsorable for the graphical display output), to see what values are there:

[email protected]:~$ xrdb -q
*customization:	-color
Xft.antialias:	1
Xft.hinting:	1
Xft.hintstyle:	hintslight
Xft.rgba:	rgb
Xcursor.theme_core:	1
[email protected]:~$

There is no sign of DPI being pre-defined. Time to move onto the next tool.

Using xdpyinfo, we can look at the display information about X, which is currently in use (as things will get defined dynamically at various points. e.g. startup, new screen attached etc):

[email protected]:~$ xdpyinfo | grep 'dimensions\|resolution'
  dimensions:    1680x1050 pixels (160x90 millimeters)
  resolution:    267x296 dots per inch
[email protected]:~$

We only get the values back once, which means there is only one monitor. Great! What isn’t so great, is the size of the physical screen, 160x90mm, being detected, which may start to explain why the font is very large (as the DPI is huge). We can also see the screen resolution is set to 1680 x 1050 and the DPI is ~267.

Next we can use xrandr as this handles the extension RandR (resize and rotate) to see if what that is reporting matches up:

[email protected]:~$ xrandr -q | grep -iw 'screen\|connected'
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 32767 x 32767
HDMI-0 connected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 160mm x 90mm
[email protected]:~$

Again, one screen. ALso, its resolution matches up with what xdpyinfo told us. We can see its using a HDMI cable and also same the same resolution & size.

Checking the logs of X, we can see:

[email protected]:~$ grep DPI /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[     7.324] (--) NVIDIA(0): DPI set to (266, 296); computed from "UseEdidDpi" X config
[email protected]:~$

Which is very close to the DPI value which xrandr reported (but off by one). We can see the graphic drive in question is NVIDIA, and its trying to get the DPI value from EDID (The GPU is trying to read the data from the monitor)

If we wanted to, we can look at the value of EDID by using edid-decode:

[email protected]:~$ sudo apt install -y edid-decode
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ xrandr --props | edid-decode -c -s
EDID version: 1.3
[...]
Maximum image size: 16 cm x 9 cm
[...]
Warnings:

Block 0 (Base Block):
  Basic Display Parameters & Features: Dubious maximum image size (160x90 is smaller than 10x10 cm)

Failures:

All Blocks:
  One or more of the timings is out of range of the Monitor Ranges:
    Vertical Freq: 24 - 75 Hz (Monitor: 23 - 75 Hz)
    Horizontal Freq: 27.000 - 79.976 kHz (Monitor: 26.000 - 68.000 kHz)
    Maximum Clock: 148.500 MHz (Monitor: 150.000 MHz)

EDID conformity: FAIL
[email protected]:~$

So it looks like the values from EDID are incorrect, so we shouldn’t listen to the monitor! We are going to need to manually define the values to use.

The easiest way to do this would be to look at the make/model of the screen (is there a a sticker on the back/under of the device?). Otherwise we can use the old fashion method of getting out a tape measure.

So what does the OS think our screen size is?

Using a bit of math (1cm is 10mm & 25.4mm is 1 inch), we can convert the millimeters (mm) to inches (in):

Remember that the output was dimensions: 1680x1050 pixels (160x90 millimeters), so we are taking “width” as 160 and “height²” as 90

[email protected]:~$ echo 'print(160/25.4)' | python3
6.299212598425197   # 6.3 in
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ echo 'print(90/25.4)' | python3
3.543307086614173   # 3.5 in
[email protected]:~$

Now, we can find the diagonal screen size by doing √(width² + height²) = diagonal:

[email protected]:~$ echo 'print( ( ((160/25.4) ** 2)+((90/25.4) ** 2) ) ** (0.5) )' | python3
7.227385728616465  # 7.2 in
[email protected]:~$

The sticker on the back of the screen says its 20 inches, yet only 7.2 inches is detected!

Using the formula √(width² + height²) / diagonal = DPI, we get:

Remember that the output was dimensions: 1680x1050 pixels (160x90 millimeters), so we are taking “width” as 1680 and “height” as 1050, and correct diagonal is 20

[email protected]:~$ # e.g. (((width ** 2)+(height² ** 2) ) ** (0.5) ) / diagonal )
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ echo 'print( (((1680 ** 2)+(1050 ** 2) ) ** (0.5) ) / 20 )' | python3
99.05680188659434  # 99 DPI
[email protected]:~$

So we need to set our DPI to be 99x99 rather than 267x296.

There are various ways we can do to fix this, each with their pros and cons:

• Editing ~/.Xresources (X configuration Recommended method)
• Editing ~/.xsessionrc (X startup script)
• NVIDIA driver settings
• Xfce GUI settings (desktop environment configuration)

We can configure X (per user). In a terminal window, run the following commands:

[email protected]:~$ echo "Xft.dpi: 99" >> ~/.Xresources
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ cat ~/.Xresources
Xft.dpi: 99
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
[email protected]:~$

After running xrdb -merge, a logout shouldn’t be required, so the next time you open a problematic program back up, the font should now be “normal”.

This is a shell script, which will automatically get executed upon a graphical login. In a terminal window, run the following commands:

[email protected]:~$ echo "xrandr --dpi 99" >> ~/.xsessionrc
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ cat ~/.xsessionrc
xrandr --dpi 99
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ xfce4-session-logout --logout
[email protected]:~$

After logging out and in again, the next time you open a problematic program back up, the font should now be “normal”.

Another approach would be to get the NVIDIA drivers to handle the DPI.

If there isn’t a configuration file for X, we are going to generate one and then move it:

[email protected]:~$ sudo apt install -y nvidia-xconfig
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf
[email protected]:~$

We can now edit the configuration file, to include the following two lines in the Section "Device" section:

• Option "UseEdidDpi" "False"
• Option "DPI" "99 x 99"

[email protected]:~$ sudo vim /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf
[...]
Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Option         "UseEdidDpi" "False"
    Option         "DPI" "99 x 99"
EndSection
[...]
[email protected]:~$
[email protected]:~$ xfce4-session-logout --logout
[email protected]:~$

After logging out and in again, the next time you open a problematic program back up, the font should now be “normal”.

We can configure Xfce by doing:

• Kali -> Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts -> DPI
  • Enable: Custom DPI Settings
  • Value: 99

A logout shouldn’t be required, so the next time you open a problematic program back up, the font should now be “normal”.

For additional reading material, you may wish to reference:

• http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/390.132/README/dpi.html
• wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/HugeFonts
• wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI
• wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xrandr