Re: desktop-devel-list Digest, Vol 142, Issue 19

["S. Brett Sutton" <bsutton noojee com au>]

Possible answers to some of xavier's questions.
> > Some questions to think about while solving this problem once and for
> > all:
> >
> > 1. What is the correct dpi to report on a projector?
Obviously this is variable based on distance from the wall.
Given I'm proposing that we make the dpi setting configurable (on a per 
screen basis) from the screen settings a user can change this on the fly.

Also what about a gnome projector 'widget/extension' that is designed to 
allow the quick changing of common project settings.
e.g. dpi, scaling etc.
> > 2. How do we detect the default scale factor? Using a 10pt font at
> > 96dpi on a football stadium monitor is probably hard to read from the
> > stands.
The default font scale should always be 1, but users should be able to 
quickly change this from the existing screen display settings widget/app.
> > 3. Does the dpi need to adjust itself when we move further away
> > from/closer to the monitor? Should we detect this via webcam?
Interesting idea, but I think that can wait until we have the 
fundamentals working.
> > 4. What dpi should curved monitors report?
I would suggest that the dpi doesn't need to change for curved monitors, 
but then I've never used one :)
> > 5. How do we expect to integrate with web standards that assume 96dpi
> > everywhere?
No this is an issue that I haven't got my head around. Some of this 
stuff is chicken and egg (by the way the egg came first its simple 
evolutionary theory) and we need to lay an egg. Some of these things we 
are talking about will hopefully move the whole industry forward and 
start accepting the fact that assuming everything is 96 dpi is just 
plain stupid :)
> 6. How do you display a window which spans 2 monitors with different DPI ?
This doesn't seem to be a problem to me. Assuming that we are going to 
scale items to the real world (10 point font is 10/72 inches) the if the 
system font is 16 points that will dictate that the title bars are (say) 
18/72 inches high. So the title bar now is exactly the same size on each 
monitor. If a user doesn't like that then they can adjust the per 
monitor scaling so the title bar/fonts are whatever size they prefer.

The key here is that we start with sensible defaults and then let the 
user take control where needed.

Brett