Hello, I never thought that this topic would fire off a major debate :-) I want to try and summarize what people are trying to say here so that we can come to some sort of conclusion (possibly) From my side, it all triggered off when i was reading the following: <a href="http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsImaging/RN-ResolutionIndependentUI/">http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsImaging/RN-ResolutionIndependentUI/</a> and the latest leopard release has some specific notes on this: <a href="http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html#HiDPI">http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html#HiDPI</a> I don't know how this is any different from Windows allowing the user to change from 96 dpi to anything else depending on the screen resolution/user needs. It looks like Quartz in the olden days assumed 72 dpi for monitors and it is changing now to suit higher dpis. Please read <a href="http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/9">http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/9</a> to see how this is still not completely solved in the case of Apple. There are still some quirks. The original question that i raised is what should application do in Linux? I guess some applications provide "Font size" option like Word Processors, Browsers which helps adjust to different resolutions/user needs. You can't assume a reasonble size to start with. Recently, i got to play around with the browser on HTC touch diamond which has a VGA screen with 260 dpi. By default the font size is so small that it is almost unreadable to my eyes. Perhaps, it is targeted at younger people :-) Sure, it could almost get the whole page in that small screen. The point here is that as long as there is font size provided by applications, it should be acceptable. I don't know how else one could solve this problem. But this does not solve all the problems. How about handling the UI scaling automatically that is beyond font rendering ? SVG (like WPF in windows) help to some extent but the system needs to handle this automatically for many applications depending on the screen resolution/UI. There were many opinions on this topic. - One point of view is that it does not matter Fixed DPI like 96 or 120 as in windows is sufficient. Scaling is just not about fonts but also the whole UI - Gnome detects dpi and uses right size fonts except there are some bugs that need fixing. Some folks feel that Gnome works reasonably well. - 96 dpi is not enough, use the real dpi of the screen. Using the real dpi means the UI needs to be designed with the max dpi in mind, but then may not look good at other dpis. - DPI is not the only factor, distance and viewing angle also matters. We can arrive at a normalized DPI which can then be used to scale UI. But some folks argue that it does not matter as majority of computer screens are at the same distance. Videoprojectors can be handled separately with some basic assumptions on distance, scaling etc. - Screens as high as 200 dpi are appearing. OLPC and embedded devices are reaching high dpi. Look at HTC black diamond with 260 dpi So, with so many views, it is not clear as to what the right solution here is. I have not possibly summarized everyones view. Am i missing anything ? Can someone better understanding than me summarize this issue so that it will be useful in the future. Or we want to debate this forever :-) thanks a lot, mohan <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Daniel Stone <<a href="mailto:daniel@fooishbar.org">daniel@fooishbar.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="Ih2E3d">On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 06:21:22PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Le Ven 27 juin 2008 17:50, Daniel Stone a écrit : > > The problem as I see it is the conflation of DPI as 'the thing I need > > to > > change to make my fonts render at a reasonable size because 12pt is > > the > > standard for very reasonably readable text and changing all my > > documents > > as stupid' (users care about) > > Actually, no. You have two sources of computer text: > > 1. system applications that should just use the user default font size > -> have a setting where the user enters his preferred font, the > preferred size for it in pt, and have apps obey it (with % sizes for > titles) > > 2. documents produced by someone else, that may use different prefs > from the ones of the user > -> all the apps that manage those documents have a built-in zoom > system, and it's stupid to even try to correct all those with a > system-wide dpi kludge because every external document won't use the > same font sizes anyway and the correction will vary document per > document (you can try to automate "match to the system font size later > but it'd be a dynamic document-specific adjustment not a fixed fake > dpi value) > > So "the thing you need to change for documents" is document-specific. </div>No, because everyone except desktop publishers deals in a standard, well-understood set of point sizes, which they expect to translate at about 96dpi, instead of maybe reallyreallytiny or LUDICROUSLY BIG. <div class="Ih2E3d"> > And it's different from "the thing you need to change for the desktop > gui" where you have *not* reason not to use pt size directly assuming > you kill all the dpi forcing kludges which have make it lose a > specific meaning on many systems. </div>I'd be more than happy for everything to be redesignated as 'size' rather than points, because as you say, it stops the conflation of the two use cases. One use case involves people who just want to use their computer and have it behave as they expect. The other involve people who get very upset when their computer behaves in a manner that's not completely in accordance with certain rigid principles. <div class="Ih2E3d"> > > and 'thing which must match my physical > > properties exactly as I'm doing typesetting' (statistically, no-one > > cares about this). > > Do you have any study that says users would not like this? They only > do not care because it's been broken so long (just as they didn't care > about AA text when the only thing available was pixelated bitmap > fonts). > > > As long as the > > two > > are fundamentally in opposition, > > They're only in fundamental opposition because some people insist in > abusing physical scaling to change font sizes instead of > (revolutionnary idea) just specifying different size defaults </div>Look, I'm happy that you care about this stuff. Really, because we need more people to tell us that we're screwing up and going wrong. But please trust me that real people don't feel that way. They see 'size 12' (something readable), rather than '12pt' (however many inches). Nothing that exists today works at all with high-density displays -- the Nokia tablets still just always smash the DPI to 96 or so, because surprisingly you have NO ROOM ON YOUR SCREEN AT 220DPI BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS REALLY BIG AND JUST IMAGINE THIS BIT IS TAKING UP THIRTEEN LINES RATHER THAN JUST BEING IN CAPS. It's ridiculous. Cheers, Daniel -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkhpIAYACgkQUVYB1rKAgJQVLgCfQk+1jypMtX8FkneqarsdQn5e OWIAniHmuTPaCLXNZ7ZpBLTfyP/9e5UU =sYnY -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list <a href="mailto:xorg@lists.freedesktop.org">xorg@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg</a> </blockquote></div>