With GL based desktops, how relevant in screen resolution?

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Fri Dec 15 08:30:50 UTC 2006


Le Ven 15 décembre 2006 03:29, Rodd Clarkson a écrit :

> How relevant is screen resolution now that my desktop is now GL based.

> For example, rather than having to pick a new resolution to make my
> desktop (fonts, titlebars, etc.) look bigger or smaller,

Screen resolution should be orthogonal to font scaling, you don't get text
twice as big when switching from 600 to 1200 dpi printers.

That it has been used in the past to control font scaling is the abuse of 
broken implementation unfortunate side-effects

> couldn't we now
> just have a slider that makes the desktop appear bigger or smaller?

There is still the slight problem of all the bitmap artwork, though it
could certainly be scaled by discrete levels (and apps just have to expect
it, just like they had to learn i18n means variable-length text strings)

Also given the poor resolution of current screens you certainly want the
highest possible resolution regardless of the user-selected scale, if only
to have sharp fonts and avoid the mess freetype autohinting is[1]. Just
moving from 100 to 125 dpi improves the font rendering tremendously (and
I'm not even talking about OLPC-like resolutions)

[1] That's not to say the freetype hackers are bad, but if autohinting was
easy no one would have specified manual hinting in the first place

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot




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