Re: GNOME and high-DPI screens

[Stormy Peters]

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Richard Hughes  wrote:

> On 4 July 2012 10:52, Olav Vitters  wrote:
> > Best to give developers high DPI screens (not kidding).
>
> From my experience working with hardware, I could not agree more. 10 x
> $500 screens sent to a few GTK developers would result in several
> hundred-man hours of work done on the high DPI issue, most likely at
> weekends and after work. If any manufacturer wants to make this stuff
> work, spending a few thousand dollars on several hundred man hours of
> work is a no brainer. Anyone from Dell or HP listening? :)
>

We have contacts at companies like Dell and HP that we could ask.

Stormy


>
> Richard.
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Re: GNOME and high-DPI screens

[Jason Simanek]

On 07/04/2012 09:53 AM, Jan Jokela wrote:

I think the correct way to handle this issue is to support full
resolution independence.


Yes. And learning from Apple might help. Note that these new Retina 
Display MacBooks introduce a new system preference for screen size. 
There are a variety of options and this Anandtech review describes how 
this is probably accomplished (just the first section):




So that approach might be worth considering. Maybe not ideal, but pragmatic.


Jason Simanek
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Re: GNOME and high-DPI screens

[Richard Hughes]

On 4 July 2012 10:52, Olav Vitters  wrote:
> Best to give developers high DPI screens (not kidding).

>From my experience working with hardware, I could not agree more. 10 x
$500 screens sent to a few GTK developers would result in several
hundred-man hours of work done on the high DPI issue, most likely at
weekends and after work. If any manufacturer wants to make this stuff
work, spending a few thousand dollars on several hundred man hours of
work is a no brainer. Anyone from Dell or HP listening? :)

Richard.
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Re: GNOME and high-DPI screens

[Jan Jokela]

I think the correct way to handle this issue is to support full resolution
independence.

And then define all fixed size visual elements in real sizes, with
templates for different device categories. Because using fixed pixel sizes
and hoping it'll work "ok" for most people is a sub-par solution.
As an example, a button would by default have a height of x millimeters on
a laptop and a bit more than that on a desktop computer, due to a slight
difference on viewing distance on those two device categories.

Then, an accessibility feature could seamlessly provide +-1.x scaling for
all displayed content. Useful for anyone who isn't happy with the defaults.

It is possible that on certain devices we won't be able to get accurate DPI
information and screen type, but we can compile static information or even
ask the user. I know many are against this type of solution but I believe
it's a fair trade off to offering a bad user experience.

Cheers,
Jan Jokela

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Olav Vitters  wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 11:34:04PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > What can regular users and casual developers do to help today? Should we
> > report things that don't scale as expected, or wait for something to get
> > into place before we start?
>
> For starters, bugs should be filed. There is one Gtk+ bug for high dpi
> screens:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546711
> it got a bit unreadable though.
>
> But I guess it needs some thought. E.g. DPI data cannot be relied upon
> (as discussed many times before). I saw another Gtk+ bug on windows
> where apparently an application has to notify that it supports high DPI
> screens.
>
> > I'm sure there won't be any fast fix-all solutions, but as screens with
> 1.5
> > and 2x the resolution of classic screens trickle out to more laptops in
> the
> > future, this'll be something that needs addressing...
>
> Agree. Best to give developers high DPI screens (not kidding).
>
> --
> Regards,
> Olav
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Re: GNOME and high-DPI screens

[Olav Vitters]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 11:34:04PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> What can regular users and casual developers do to help today? Should we
> report things that don't scale as expected, or wait for something to get
> into place before we start?

For starters, bugs should be filed. There is one Gtk+ bug for high dpi
screens:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546711
it got a bit unreadable though.

But I guess it needs some thought. E.g. DPI data cannot be relied upon
(as discussed many times before). I saw another Gtk+ bug on windows
where apparently an application has to notify that it supports high DPI
screens.

> I'm sure there won't be any fast fix-all solutions, but as screens with 1.5
> and 2x the resolution of classic screens trickle out to more laptops in the
> future, this'll be something that needs addressing...

Agree. Best to give developers high DPI screens (not kidding).

-- 
Regards,
Olav
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GNOME and high-DPI screens

[Brion Vibber]

I've recently acquired a Retina Display MacBook Pro, with a native
2880x1800 15" screen. Apple's approach to this on Mac OS X is similar to
iOS and Android running on high-density mobile displays: providing a
device-independent coordinate system that matches "traditional" pixel size,
scaled at some fixed factor to native device pixels. This leaves "old" apps
looking the right size but pixelated, while newer apps can drop in
high-resolution imagery where necessary without changing layout. [Detail:
any given window has a backing store at either 1.0 or 2.0 scale, and the
window manager / compositor scales them to fit the screen(s) they appear on
appropriately.]

Of course I'd love to see GNOME thrive on screens like this too... some day
this MacBook should become a proud Linux machine. :) I've been fiddling
with Ubuntu in a virtual machine while manually setting the screen to
2880x1800 unscaled to see what I get today. (VirtualBox gets
backwards-compatibility zoom mode normally, so I have to crank up to
unscaled mode to get all the pixels available to the Linux VM.)

>From what I can see the GNOME/Gtk+/X11 world so far works similarly to the
Windows desktop in that you can scale up text or DPI, but most everything
continues to address device pixels directly no matter how high you crank it
up -- leaving icons and other fixed-pixel-size elements tiny on a high-DPI
screen.

I've found that I can use the gnome-tweak tool to bump the text scaling
factor up to 2.0 and a lot of stuff looks pretty nice. Ubuntu's Unity
doesn't fare well, but GNOME-Shell w/ Adwaita theme scales up its dialogs,
status bar icons, and window decorations reasonably well -- with exceptions
like the on/off switches in the menus remaining small. On launching a few
apps, there are lots of problems, generally from seeing a mix of
text-relative-scaled objects and fixed-pixel-size icons or windows. Firefox
and Epiphany show UI scaled to the text factor, but web pages default to
showing tiny. The GNOME system settings app can't be resized, making it a
bit awkward. :)

Here's a screenshot of Gimp, showing a representative mix of good and bad
UI elements:
http://leuksman.com/log/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screenshot-from-2012-07-03-220521.png


Is there a strategy within GNOME for handling high-density displays of this
sort in the future?
* scaling more icons and widgets against the text scaling factor
automatically?
* sizing windows based on the text scaling factor, rather than raw pixels?
* making mouse cursors larger to maintain visibility?
* more SVG for icons?
* should things use device DPI instead of a GNOME-specific scaling factor?
How can this be easily overridden when Xorg seems to force it to 96dpi?
* even if DPI is cranked up, do we have to deal with scaling widgets to fit?
* most scarily: how to deal with multiple monitors with different display
densities?
* do we care about app backward-compatibility, or assume that good apps
will be updated to work in the future?

What can regular users and casual developers do to help today? Should we
report things that don't scale as expected, or wait for something to get
into place before we start?

I'm sure there won't be any fast fix-all solutions, but as screens with 1.5
and 2x the resolution of classic screens trickle out to more laptops in the
future, this'll be something that needs addressing...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / bvibber @ wikimedia.org)
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