How to increase font size in virtual console (tty) in Ubuntu 20.04 on 4k screen? Or how to change the resolution?

Question

I am using a dell XPS 13 laptop with 4k screen and the text on the virtual console is very small. I would like to increase the font size. With the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup I took:

1. UTF-8
2. Guess optimal character set
3. TerminusBold
4. 16x32 (framebuffer only)

This seems to be the largest font available. Does anyone know if it is possible to obtain larger font sizes somewhere? Can you download them for example? The 16x32 size seems to be the largest available on my system. For a 13 inch 4k screen it is still small. Any help is highly appreciated, I am new to using ubuntu.

Another option would be to change the resolution of the tty console. Is it possible to have different resolutions for the tty2-tty6 consoles compared to the tty1 where you use the GUI?

Answer 1

It is possible to obtain larger fonts in PSF format - for example, on Debian, you can install Spleen fonts with:

sudo apt install fonts-spleen

That contains a 32x64 font - which you sadly cannot use! When you try to install it with:

sudo setfont spleen-32x64

you get:

setfont: ERROR psffontop.c:179 read_fontfile: Font is too big

This leads you to reading the manual page for setfont, where you can find there is an option -d to double the font height and width - but it says there that it is only suitable for sizes up to 16x16 because of kernel limitations.

So, the answer seems to be that it is not possible to exceed 32x32 as the largest possible font.