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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Font size setting inconsistency in kcontrol with DPI > 75 (more info)
From:       Keith Packard <keithp () keithp ! com>
Date:       2001-01-27 20:15:55
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> On modern systems, the X server is able to get dpi settings from the monitor. 
> Qt adjusts fonts to those settings, apparently others do not.

Most (lame) apps allow XLFD to generate pixel sizes from point sizes for 
them, selecting fonts by point size instead of pixel size.  This allows 
the (usually broken) font path to control the resulting font size.  The
right answer is for the application to compute the desired pixel size and 
select the closest available size.  That way you always get the same size 
glyphs on the screen, independent of the resolution.

One problem with this approach is that the X server can switch resolutions 
while running (alt-KP+, alt-KP-).  Applications can't tell (yet) that this 
has happened, leaving them in the dark as to the current screen 
resolution.  Using the reported resolution in this case will yield poor 
results.

Another is that users from the Windows world expect that increasing the 
number of pixels on the screen won't improve the quality of the 
presentation, but rather make it worse by shrinking the size of all text.  
In that world, selecting the number of pixels on the screen has much more 
to do with selecting the desired size of text than presentation quality.

If KDE provided a place to override the detected screen resolution, users 
could choose to adjust the overall text size on the screen.

The Xft'd Qt version uses the Xft.scale setting to adjust text size; I use 
that to shrink all text on my laptop as I'm usually closer to the screen 
and can see smaller features.

keithp@keithp.com	 XFree86 Core Team		SuSE, Inc.

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