The console font on this from-scratch build changed three times before it settled. Each swap had a specific, quantified reason tied to this exact monitor, not a general sense that the text was "too small."
Where it started
The LFS book recommends Lat2-Terminus16 as its default console font — a reasonable general choice, full Latin coverage, a sensible size on an ordinary display. On this panel's native 1920x1200 KMS console mode, that recommendation produced roughly 75 rows of text on screen at once, each one small enough to be genuinely hard to read.
The first fix, and why it still wasn't enough
LatGrkCyr-12x22 was the next attempt — a taller glyph, 22 pixels instead of 16, with the same full Unicode coverage rationale as the original. It cut the row count to around 54, a real improvement. But this panel's physical size and resolution together work out to roughly 162 pixels per inch — a 1920x1200 panel on a 300x190mm screen — and at that density, a 22-pixel-tall glyph measures out to only about 3.4mm on the actual physical screen. Still small enough to be uncomfortable, once the math on the real hardware got done instead of just comparing pixel counts to the previous font.
What actually fixed it
latarcyrheb-sun32, at 16x32 pixels, is 45% taller than the font it replaced — not a modest bump, a real jump in physical size, while keeping the same broad coverage (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew glyphs) the previous choice had. At this panel's actual PPI, that's the difference between a glyph that's genuinely hard to read and one that isn't, confirmed by trying it rather than assumed from the numbers alone.
Why the PPI math mattered more than pixel counts
Comparing font sizes by pixel height alone — 16 versus 22 versus 32 — doesn't say anything about how large a glyph actually looks on a specific screen. A 22-pixel font is objectively taller than a 16-pixel one, but "objectively taller" and "actually readable on this monitor" are different claims, and the first one doesn't imply the second without knowing the panel's real pixel density. Getting from "still too small" to "readable" took converting pixel height into physical millimeters for this specific hardware, not just picking the next font up the list.