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List:       fedora-devel-list
Subject:    Re: F25 workstation, and (almost) hidpi displays
From:       Martin Bříza <mbriza () redhat ! com>
Date:       2016-10-26 8:17:15
Message-ID: op.ypxla202trc8xl () dhcp-4-121 ! brq ! redhat ! com
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On Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:20:30 +0200, Adam Williamson  
<adamwill@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 08:30 +0200, nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net 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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