rawhide report: 20050121 changes

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 02:13:16AM +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> How common are such resolutions? 19" TFTs with 1280x1024 (90dpi) should
> be the typical usecase. When the minority with >=135dpi is large enough,
> bitmap-fonts for this resolution can be created.

Yeah, but with those kinds of resolutions, you have enough pixels to
work with that you get benefits from AA and subpixel rendering, at least
in my experience. (Can subpixel rendering even be done with bitmap fonts?)

Fontconfig, AA, etc. gives absolutely beautiful text on these displays
*today*. I'm not saying AA should be force-enabled on all text editors
and terminals, just that users should have it as an available option.

> For text based applications I do not need device independent sizes; the
> text must be only readable.

On high-DPI displays, my personal experience is that the best way to get
readable text is to have device-independent sizes. That's my experience
under both Linux and Windows.

> > Now, find perfect quality bitmap fonts that will display at 10 points on
> > a 135DPI display... IME, bitmap fonts for text editors are the height of
> > perfection on a 15" 1024x768 LCD and the bane of my existence on a 15"
> > 1600x1200 LCD.
> 
> I use them on 13" TFT + 15" CRT 1024x768, 17" 1152x768 (CRT) + 1280x1024
> (TFT), 19" TFT 1280x1024 and 22" CRT 1600x1200, and bitmap fonts look
> perfect there.

To clarify what I meant: On a high-DPI display, a "perfect" 9 or
10-point bitmap font is too small, and once you switch to a bitmap font
that's large enough, you end up getting a better appearance from
antialiased non-bitmap fonts for those sizes anyway.

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn at pobox.com>