First off, let me say that the new Gnome 2.20 has some very nice things, but at a price. Here's a little quick tip to avoid you pulling your hair out.

As of sometime between 2.18 and 2.20, the Pango library started respecting X11's DPI setting. This defaults to 75 dpi on every distro I've ever cared enough to check, btw. You can check your Xorg logs to see what your current DPI is.

So, what's it matter? Previously, Pango hard-coded 96 dpi as a default value. You could of course change this through Pango, but 96 was great. You got used to it, things just plain worked, etc. Now, however, with 2.20, Pango is going to use X11's value, which in my case (and prolly yours) was 75. The effect this has is that my fonts rendered about 4 points smaller than they used to.

I sit a good 2 feet away from my monitor, possibly 3, and use a resolution of 1600x1200. Now, even though I wear contact lenses, I have 20/20 vision (with them in, of course). Prior to the upgrade, I had no problem reading my default font at 2 feet. In fact, I can read them at 5 feet, but that's about the edge of my comfort level. Any farther and I have to strain to make them out, or, can't read them at all.

Post-upgrade, however, I couldn't read my font at 2 feet. I had to be a foot away to read with out straining myself. My default font renders at 12 points, but it looked like it was 8 or 6 points after Pango's upgrade. Talk about some eye strain. Changing the default font size in Gnome, however, doesn't affect apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, and X-Chat. Apps that are built on GTK+, but aren't tied into Gnome's preferences, such as those, will have to be adjusted manually. The solution? Easy... so long as you're using the nVidia driver.

Add this line to your xorg.conf file, under the "Device" section.

Option "DPI" "96 x 96"

That's all you need.

If you don't use nVidia's drivers, sucks to be you. There is a way to do it (again, in your xorg.conf file) but you'll have to do some math and figure out the appropriate resolution. There's a guide somewhere but I forget where, so google it. It has to do with X's DPI settings, so it shouldn't be too terribly hard to find.

Anyway, hope this info helps somebody.