NawaMan's Blog

For those who migrate from Windows to Linux, wine is one of the must-have programs. You can run most of Windows application on Linux using wine. The problem is that programs that run with Wine does not follow appearance setting of Linux. You need to set it explicitly to wine configuration. Wine should detect the setting of Linux desktop and apply that to its setting automatically but it does not, at least for now. This is not a complain . I know wine team have more important things call reimplementing Windows to do and look-and-feel setting is a lower priority jobs.

Most of the time the problem is the font size. Since wine settings derive mostly from Windows XP and Windows XP was first came out when high-resolution screens were not yet widely-available, font setting of wine tends to be targeting for lower-resolution screen. In other word, font of application running on wine always looks very small for the modern screen.

The following is how we can set font size for application on Wine.
1. Use Text Editor to open a file named “~/.wine/system.reg”. This can be done easily by pressing Alt+F2 anyway and type “gedit ~/.wine/system.reg” or just open the file from text editor. NOTE: “~” means your home folder.

2. Search for a setting entry named “LogPixels”. This can be done by press Ctrl+F or Select the Menu Search -> Find. In Find Dialog, type the word “LogPixels” to find the setting entry.

3. Change the setting to the desired value. The original value is 00000060 or 60 DPI (Dot per inch). You can set to 96 or 128 or actually any value you need. My laptop monitor is 1280×800 and my eyes are not very good so I set the value to 96.

4. Save the setting and restart your wine program.

Tip: You can quickly run “wine notepad” to test your setting since notepad is the fastest to load. Either run “wine notepad” in terminal or run via run dialog (Alt+F2).

Done.