Sunday, October 12. 2014
Huge fonts in new Chromium 38
A very short entry this time about debian and its chromium package. Today I have updated my laptop and the chromium package has been upgraded to version 38. Nothing strange during the process, but as soon as I started the browser all the fonts were absolutely huge (so big that the menus were not readable, only the first letters were shown and, therefore, you could not guess what the item was saying). It seems that it is a known issue because I quickly found several bugs (for example this debian bug, which explains my issue, and a similar ubuntu bug).
In order to fix the problem you need to add the following argument to the chromium startup: --force-device-scale-factor=1. For what I understand now chrome try to guess the scaling factor based in the DPI of your monitor and something is not currently working. In summary, if you want your chromium browser to look exactly as before the upgrade, just add a file inside the /etc/chromium.d/ directory adding the commented parameter.
# cat /etc/chromium.d/force-scaling CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --force-device-scale-factor=1"
Another tip is that now chromium uses (at least in debian) a configuration directory instead of a single file (now /etc/chromium.d/ exists instead of the /etc/chromium/default file that was used in previous entries). So if you want the pepper flash to work again you also need to reinstall it. Remember that now there is a non-free package called pepperflashplugin-nonfree that handles the plugin automatically:
# /usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --uninstall # /usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install
After those two actions my chromium browser was back to normal aspect and behavior.
Regards!
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