A bit late, but still this thread has been slightly getting on my nerves... On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 16:44:40 +0100 Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 11:35:08AM -0400, Simo Sorce wrote: > > > I am sure display manager can easily grow a button to say something > > along the lines of: change font resolution to better fit multiple > > monitors. so that when someone that has widely varying DPIs between > > monitors plugs a second monitor in they can press that button and > > get whatever default you like best for that use case. > > We could do that, but you'd still need toolkit support for triggering > a re-render of everything. Try changing font size in xfce (or gnome 2, not sure about gnome 3 or kde). Every GTK app re-renders. The same happens when I manually change DPI. So where's the missing support? Now to the actual problem: a) Xorg+randr does its best in reporting the correct DPI per display and probably should (or does) fall back to some default value when the screen dimensions are obviously incorrect. You could also add some white-list/black-list for devices that have known/unknown data despite reporting incorrect ones. I have no reason not to believe ajax that X is already doing its best in this area. It apparently also allows for overriding the data in case user knows the reported data are wrong. BTW. for my display it's reported correctly ;-) b) DPI is physical resolution of the pixels. In theory we always either know it or user can count it (you can measure the size of your monitor or tv, you can measure the size of the area data-projector shines on,...). However it's pointless for making use of it on TVs and data-projectors -- you watch them from distance => you don't expect to read 12pt big font from several meters. c) DEs, Toolkits and Apps. They should IMHO do it's best to make use of the data X provide, not try to override it. Allow the user to enter the correct DPI (you can let him to check physical resolution of the device, or use a physical ruler to match with virtual one or something like that). When adding another screen, DPI of the first one should be used as current toolkits don't support rendering say half of window with one DPI and another one with different one (for me it looks incredibly hard to make work actually). At the same time user should be asked whether he wants to use some kind of "magnifier" on the new screen. This setting should be remembered so next time user plugs in the same device same settings would be applied. d) Points are real unit of measure -- 1/72 inch. So it does not makes sense if they are differently big on different screens unless explicitly zoomed in/out. If you want to set wrong DPI, don't use points for UI font sizes, it simply does not make sense. Unfortunately small, big, huge is also pointless - with high DPI even huge can be small and otherwise (or when watching from small or great distance). Martin
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