Red Hat's David Zeuthen blogged today about the huge patch he submitted to GTK+ that will allow the toolkit to achieve resolution independence - widget and font size adapting to your screen's real estate; no more tiny application lost in the corner of your high resolution screen. Although more work is obviously required, Zeuthen's idea is to use RI as the hot-new-feature selling point of the upcoming 3.0 GTK+ release. Discussion is going on in the gtk-devel mailing list and there is an ogg video of the feature in action.
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Member since:2006-01-12
This could be the killer feature that gets me to use Gnome if they can do it right.
I'm on a 21" display at 1280x1024 and most web pages have by default ridiculously small text. Even better they completely ignore your selected font size and continue to use 5pt Comic Sans.
The result is that I have to use a minimum font size of 20 which breaks half the pages out there (OSNews isn't all that bad. This editing field is partly below the headlines on the right but otherwise it actually uses html as designed) who confuse web design with DTP.
Fortunately my vision is quite good (I just want to keep it that way as I read quite a lot online) so I can reduce the minimum font size for pages that break completely and that I absolutely have to use. I don't wanna be someone who can't read that small text.
Member since:2005-09-21
That is really poor resolution for such a large monitor.
Something is very wrong. You shouldn't have any problems with small text unless you're running really high resolutions, which you aren't.
In any case, if the DPI of your display is set properly, font size won't be a problem. Remember that pt is a physical size. So 8pt font size should be the same physical size on any screen if it is set up correctly.
You can force override that in any browser. Most webpages choose reasonable fonts though.
Your DPI is incorrect. In X, set the DisplaySize to the physical dimensions of your monitor (google for more info on how to do that).
Either that, or use FF3/Opera and use full page zoom to get bigger font sizes without breaking layouts.
Member since:2007-02-11
I totally agree with leos, something is quite wrong with your monitor/system.
Unless you have sight problems (which would explain why you need low-resolution on a big display -- using a screen magnifier like xmag sucks terribly), things shouldn't go that wrong on your monitor. I had a 21" CRT myself (switched to a 22" LCD due to space and power consumption issues -- that beast took half of my desk and sucked more power than my computer itself). I used it in the largest resolution available (2048x1536) and didn't have any problem reading text. In fact, I don't have any problem now either -- but I'm in a lower resolution (1680x1050).
If you're under GTK, there's a known issues related to font sizes; or there used to be a while ago, just google for it. If fonts seem to small in general, try to see if, for some funky reason, your system isn't set up to use very small sizes.
Member since:2005-08-08
Isn't most bitmap images in 72dpi or something? I think that it is the one I usually see in photoshop and friends at least. So unless the image do have a dpi set (which some of them do) just assume 72 and go from there. No biggie.
With vectors you rather want to know how big it's suppose to be in something like mm or so, as RI isn't so much about scaling the UI like a madman, but rather have things have the right physical size (as physical as a screen gets that is).
What I really wish for is for all major OSes to get this, so we finally can start getting some seriously high DPI screens 
Member since:
2005-12-31
> So, in the future atleast all icon sets have to also include information
> about their desired DPI so GTK+ knows how to transform them.
They could define a "standard resolution" in which all media has its intrinsic size, and scale according to the factor to the current resolution (taking aspect ratio into account, of course, so icons don't get horizontally stretched on wide screens).
Media size would still scale with overall display size (as opposed to resolution), but unless you're doing publishing work, you often want that. And an overall scale argument is still possible as a counter-measure.
> Also, how about the performance? Are all those icons/images et al
> transformed in software or do they try to accelerate that process via
> OpenGL or X acceleration?
Depends. On the one hand, graphics hardware can do really fast transformations. On the other hand, its resampling mechanics are far from perfect - this could be done much better in software. Fortunately, scaling and resampling must be done only once at application load time, since the screen resolution usually don't change often.
The only scenario where speed would actually suffer is when doing software scaling and resampling during run-time (i.e. with every draw operation), but I don't see any advantage of doing so.