On Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:20:30 +0200, Adam Williamson
<adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 08:30 +0200, nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
But, GTK core maintainers have always insisted those didn't exist
(just like they insisted on hardcoding 96 dpi, on the eve of Apple
showing the world it was arbitrary and obsolete).
...by releasing displays carefully tuned to look best at a precise
integer multiple of 96dpi? Not really great support for your theory.
Sure, it's arbitrary. Arbitrary doesn't necessarily mean 'bad'. The
96dpi consensus worked perfectly well: hardware manufacturers knew what
sizes and resolutions to make their monitors, and font designers (and
UI designers) knew that when they had to make a tricky decision about
how to tweak something, they should favour whatever choice makes it
look good at 96dpi. Which is really important when you're designing
something as finicky at a font, at a resolution as low as 96dpi; the
question of which point size you choose as the cutoff for rendering a
simple line as 1 pixel wide or 2 pixels wide is extremely important,
for e.g.
I used to go for the the 'everything should be perfectly resolution
independent!' argument, because it seems intellectually satisfying from
some sort of theoretical engineering point of view, but I find the
argument that it's not really the most *practical* way to do things
pretty convincing.
Even now, the consensus mostly survives; most hardware is designed to
work best at 96dpi or an integer multiple thereof. Awkward things like
13" 1080p displays are still in a distinct minority.
As a guy with a few screens that can be considered hidpi (3k on 13" and 4k
on 23"), I have to say just integer scaling is just not enough, especially
if you can't setup the scaling factor.
For example the 23" 4k display is NOT scaled, despite the fact I've got a
fullHD display of the same size, that results in having windows on the 4k
screen that are half as small as the ones on the fullHD display. Meanwhile
the 3k 13" display actually is scaled (don't know the factor but I guess
2x) and everything is way too large to my taste.
Scaling by an arbitrary float number may be too much but I think trying to
mimic Windows in this wouldn't be a bad idea. There you can set (manually,
despite there's an initial estimation of what you'd probably want) scaling
to be 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, etc. This still leaves room for glitches but
I think on toolkit level, it's possible to tweak the layouts, font
rendering,... just for those values.
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