On 29 Jan 2006 at 18:38, Brad Beyenhof wrote: > On 1/29/06, Cecil Rigby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > just wondering--- > > Why is it that when I view at 75% the rulers have inches that are > > correct, but at 100% view inches are one and five-eighths long? It's > > obvious the length is relative to view, but one would expect an inch > > to be the right length at 100% view, no? > > It's all a function of your monitor size and screen resolution. The > rulers you see in Finale are actually a certain number of *pixels* > wide. If you've got a 19" monitor at 1280x960 resolution, a "ruler > inch" at 100% is smaller than an actual inch.
Perhaps in any particular application, but not of necessity. > Programmers don't write code that automatically measures your screen > and resolution to give you perfect inches (these factors are wildly > variable, so writing such code is likely a waste of programming > resources). . . . No, programmers of applications, don't, but programmers of operating systems provide parameters available to applications to figure out how to render fonts and graphics. On Windows, there's something called "twips" which are something like Finale's EVPUs, in that they are used to define the sizing of graphical elements and fonts onscreen, based on the given screen resolution and base font size. Another issue is that the basic Windows resolution is 96dpi and the Mac is 72dpi, which is, interestingly enough, 75% of 96dpi. However, if the ruler were being sized for 72dpi, one would expect it to be 1 1/3 inches at 100% instead of 1 5/8ths. > . . . That's the reason for allowing custom zoom percentages. Huh? Custom zoom is there for a number of reasons. You might size your music very small for printing, and thus want ot magnify it for work. Or you might have a very large score so that you need a very small magnification in order to see a whole page, or a large magnification to see the details of a passage clearly. While there is an interaction between screen resolution and zoom factor of a document displayed in an application, the reason for providing the zoom function would exist even if all monitors had only a single resolution. > Disclaimer: I am not a programmer, but this is how I understand the > situation... real programmers, feel free to correct me. > > -- > Brad Beyenhof > Real-time Finale discussion: http://www.finaleirc.com > my blog: http://augmentedfourth.blogspot.com > Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also > deprive me of the possibility of being right. ~ Igor Stravinsky It's possible for a programmer to retrieve the information about resolution and base font size from the underlying OS, so there's no reason that onscreen rulers can't be accurate at 100%. However, there is lots of software out there (Finale is not such a piece of software) that wrongly assumes only the standard base font size. The result is that these apps often poorly display dialog boxes when run with a larger base font size (such as Windows Large Fonts, which are 125% normal size). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
