Here I am, using a 185 dpi display, and the font of XTerm menus¹ borders the unreadable small.
Investigating XTerm's XResources, I found a promising name but
$ xrdb -merge XTerm*SimpleMenu*menuLabel.font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-180-100-100-*-*-iso10646-1^D $ didn't help.
Is it possible to specify a larger font for XTerm's menus?
1 The fonts of the VT100 widget(?) are perfectly fine, this is not a question about changing the fonts of the XTerm main window.
You can be less specific, and it should work:
xterm -xrm 'XTerm*SimpleMenu*font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-180-100-*-*-*-*-*' (You seem to have an extra ^D at the end of your example). Make sure you have the font, test with
xlsfonts -fn '-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-180-100-*-*-*-*-*' and find one with xfontsel.
^d is an overzealous attempt to represent an EoF passed to xrdb. It seems that an even more generic XTerm*font: ... would do, and I was posting it as an answer but you have been faster! Thank you. Here is my (even more) generic font specification
$ xrdb -merge XTerm*font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-140-100-100-*-*-iso10646-1 $ xterm and here it is what a XTerm's menu now looks like. 