F11 for XO1 - Fonts

Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrothal at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 4 13:43:22 UTC 2009


I'm sorry to intervene... but would it be possible the XO specific requirements (eg font size 7, removal of Xft.dpi etc) to be taken care by the iso to nand script? 
So Sugarlabs builds as wide as possible and hardware specific things are managed by the installation scripts? or a post install config script?
Showing properly in a variety of hardware is not only a matter of font size but also toolbar sizes, images etc I do not know if SL should undertake a sophisticated scaling at this point.
my 2c

--- On Tue, 8/4/09, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> From: Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>
> Subject: Re: F11 for XO1 - Fonts
> To: "Daniel Drake" <dsd at laptop.org>
> Cc: "Yioryos Asprobounitis" <mavrothal at yahoo.com>, fedora-olpc-list at redhat.com, "sugar-devel" <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2009, 7:15 AM
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:48, Daniel
> Drake<dsd at laptop.org>
> wrote:
> > 2009/8/4 Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>:
> >>> A method to specify the font size (measured in
> points).
> >>
> >> What font size would be that?
> >
> > That would be up to the deployments.
> > For example, OLPC would choose 7.
> 
> I meant to ask to which UI elements this font size would
> apply to.
> 
> >> I guess we should, for improved accessibility. And
> would be convenient
> >> if the paddings, line widths, icon sizes, etc also
> scaled accordingly
> >> (may not be possible with current gtk+).
> >
> > Not yet, but there are ongoing efforts to create an
> overall "scale
> > factor"-like system that will be nice.
> >
> >> I don't hate it in itself. But I need to know
> better why using Xft.dpi
> >> is not a good solution (real technical
> disadvantages) and which
> >> mechanism uses gtk+/gnome so we can reuse their
> work there.
> >
> > It's going against an established system that ensures
> that fonts of
> > the same point size are the same physical dimensions
> when shown on
> > different screens and on paper.
> >
> > To me it also just doesn't make sense... if the fonts
> are too small,
> > then the logical thing is to use bigger fonts, not to
> start pretending
> > that you have a screen with different characteristics
> from the one
> > that you are using. This would also be important to
> deployments where
> > technical resources are lesser - at least to me,
> thinking of font size
> > in terms of the size of the font (a familiar concept
> to MS word
> > users!) is much more logical than thinking about the
> number of pixels
> > in a square inch on the display on which the fonts
> will be rendered.
> > (for example, for someone unfamiliar with that line of
> thinking, it is
> > not obvious whether you should increase or decrease
> the DPI in order
> > to make the fonts bigger)
> >
> > Freetype visually optimizes the font renderings based
> on the DPI and
> > sometimes gives odd-looking results when the selected
> DPI is not that
> > of the actual display. (ever seen the subpixel
> rendering option result
> > in worse appearance than before? this is usually the
> cause)
> >
> > It also will confuse any applications that make
> calculations based on
> > the DPI of the fonts against the millimetre-width of
> the screen --
> > although these are not that common.
> >
> > GNOME use this same kind of approach. GNOME ships
> default font sizes
> > and has an "Appearance" dialog with a fonts tab that
> lets you increase
> > or decrease the font size. KDE is similar.
> 
> That's all ok, but how do you see us moving from using
> Xft.dpi (that
> today can get us font sizes that look good on several
> systems), to
> font sizes to achieve the same?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Tomeu
> 


      




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