Question 1.13: Adjusting the Picture Size on your Monitor When you first co......
Adjusting the Picture Size on your Monitor
When you first connect a Raspberry Pi to a monitor, you may find that some of the text cannot be read because it extends off the screen, or the picture isn’t using all the space available on the screen.
If your text extends off the screen, use the raspi-config tool to turn overscan off.
To do this, run raspi-config by opening a Terminal session and issuing the command:
| $ sudo raspi-config |
Then use the cursor keys to scroll down to the option overscan, and turn overscan off (Figure 1-10).
If your problem is that there is a large black border around the picture, then you can reduce this (and possibly eliminate it entirely) by editing the file /boot/config.txt using the command:
| $ sudo nano /boot/config.txt |
Look for the section dealing with overscan. The four lines you need to change are shown in the middle of Figure 1-11.
For the lines to take effect, you first need to uncomment them by removing the # character from the start of each line.
Then, using trial and error, change the settings until the screen fills as much of the monitor as possible. Note that the four numbers should be negative. Try setting them all to –20 to start with.
Discussion
Having to repeatedly restart the Raspberry Pi to see the effects of the changes in resolution is a little tedious. Fortunately, you will only have to do this procedure once. Many monitors and TVs work just fine without any adjustments being necessary.
See Also
You can find much more information about the raspi-config tool at http://elinux.org/RPi_raspi-config.
