There are long painful discussions on this in GNOME bugzilla, X.Org
mailing lists and probably several dozen other places online, that
I don't really like repeating all of here (google can find them if
you want to read them, though the X.Org thread went quickly from
good discussion into flaming of the "blur fascists").
In general, the Xserver today probably already knows your DPI better
than you do, since it can just ask your monitor and not have to hope
you can find a tape measure.
GNOME has fluctuated between assuming the Xserver couldn't be trusted
(in the past it couldn't be, before EDID gained widespread adoption to
allow us to ask your monitor), in which case it set everyone to 96 dpi,
and trusting the Xserver, scaling fonts appropriately, and annoying
those upgrading from releases where they'd set their fonts to the size
they wanted for a 96 dpi scaling.
No matter whether you believe the X server or not, there are no easy
answers to DPI - and DPI isn't really what you want to use (what's the
DPI of a projector? Do you really want your fonts scaled to 1 pixel
high if you view a 24-point font on a 6dpi projector? Angular size
is more relevant there, as it takes distance from your eyeball to the
screen into account). Even if you do want to use DPI, you can't always
know the correct DPI, as the X screen can be made up of multiple overlapping
areas displayed on different devices - what's the DPI of a system with
a 120dpi LCD and a 72dpi CRT set up in clone mode to show the same pixels?
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
James Cornell wrote:
> They call that resolution independence. The whole thing behind
> Leopard and Vista was measurement by inches or centimeters instead of
> the futile pixel which has itself deeply embedded into everything.
> That's not to say that all applications therein won't use pixels or
> that either system is a panacea, but it's important to know what
> customers want and not just listen to your engineer's pipe dreams as
> seems to be the norm at Sun. Personally I find this is the reason the
> "viability" of X11 in general is a problem for most regular users who
> expect consistency and modern practices.
>
> James
> On Sep 5, 2008, at 10:04 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 5 Sep 2008, Evan Yan wrote:
>>>> Actually, instead of changing font sizes you should change the
>>>> resolution dots per inch (click Details on the fonts dialog). If
>>>> you are
>>>> using a laptop or LCD screen the dot resolution is probably more
>>>> like
>>>> 120 dpi than the default 96 dpi.
>>>>
>>> Given most people use LCD screens nowadays, I guess we should either
>>> change the default dpi, or use a larger font size.
>> I don't see any correlation between LCD screens and DPI. The LCD
>> screen I am using is an accurate 96 DPI. I have seen LCD screens up
>> to 200 DPI, and screens (targeted for TV applications) with rather low
>> resolution.
>>
>> It seems most worthwhile to provide an easy interface so that the user
>> can tell the X11 server what the actual DPI is (by entering the
>> physical dimensions of the display area). Applications should take
>> this into account when rendering glyphs.
>>
>> Bob
>> ======================================
>> Bob Friesenhahn
>> bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
>> GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
>>
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>> desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
>
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