[LONG] On the 96dpi Fedora/GNOME setting

[Adam Jackson]

Callum Lerwick wrote:

> CSS shows how to do it. We need to be able to specify padding and widget
> sizes in device independent units like ems, points, inches and/or
> centimeters. There was some rumbling about adapting GTK to do something
> this, I don't know if anything's come of it yet.

Not really sure why this thread is not on a Gnome list, but.

The important piece to notice here is that you don't want to scale the 
UI by tweaking dots per inch.  You want to scale it by tweaking dots per 
degree of arc.  The DPI measurement coming out of the X server is a 
(educated) guess at the physical properties of the screen, it's 
inappropriate to abuse it for font scaling.  The only reason you want to 
know about DPI during font rendering is so you can optimize antialiasing 
to best fit the glyph to the device.

- ajax