Speaking of fonts...

[Tom Horsley]

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 05:06 +0930, Tim wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 14:31 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> > I think I know what the real problem is with getting good font
> > display by default. There isn't enough information in the
> > xorg.conf file to scale the fonts properly. It came to me
> > when thinking about this, that the bigger your monitor, the
> > farther back you tend to sit.
> 
> While that *may* be true, I'm not really sure what you're referring to
> as "good" font display and scaling.

I'm not sure either, but I am sure what we have now is bad :-).

>   For me, good font rendering would
> be smooth fonts above a certain size, and not trying to draw fonts with
> too few pixels for small font sizes

That's a good point too. The fonts should include
a minimum pixel size. The linear scaling algorithm at some point
will tell you to make the text 1 pixel high, which will clearly
not be readable, somewhere bigger than that is a minimum size
the font should be rendered at.

> I can see automating that failing in a number of ways:
> 
> I sit further back from my VDU because I can't stand the flickering, but
> my eyesight is good enough that I have fonts the same size as most other
> people 

So we also need a EyesightQuality parameter to go with
DistanceFromMonitor :-).

> Traditional computers seem to mess up the interaction, and definitions
> of resolution and screen size.

That's certainly for sure. Certainly I can increase font sizes
in firefox, but all that does is make the rendering of other stuff
screw up. You theoretically have a choice, but actually if you try
to change anything the total web page gets so badly rendered it
becomes unreadable. Same applies to other apps (like apps that popup
dialog boxes that are fixed size containing text that uses the
font size preference - you can't even manually resize the dialog
because the app won't let you, but you can't read the message because
it is truncated by the fixed size dialog box).

Sigh...