Re: row and column size not being preserved when switching X displays

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Ryan Pavlik wrote:

> > > > Gnumeric stores things as pts.  However, it defaults to using 96 dpi
> > > > for the display, which is what XL appears to do.  You can edit the
> > > > settings in the prefs dialog.  When the code was written most X
> > > > servers got the dpi measurements wrong, we should probably add a
> > > > setting to trust them now.

> > > The pref dialog does not have these settings anymore. (REcall that you
> > > requested not to include those internal settings.) One now has to use
> > > the gconf-editor to change them.


> > True, but 1.2.x still has them.
> > For 1.3.x I'd like to add a way to 'use monitor dpi'
> > a clear plan.  Possible via dpi < 0 or potentially another flag.

> For what it's worth, the Gimp "first run" installer asks for a DPI,
> offers a way to determine it (measure the length of rulers they give you
> and input that length), and allows you to trust the OS (even on
> Windows).  On Windows, at least, it appears to get values that look
> pretty good.

"First run" installers are a disaster, far worse than extra options in the
preferences dialog and in some cases you need to put them in the
Preferences dialog anyway to allow for later configuration.

When a user first runs a program they are least able to know what
decisions they should make.  Most users neither understand nor care about
the options presented and click OK to them all.  Gnome 1.4 went overboard
with these kinds of first run installers/configuration wizards but in most
cases they have been removed since Gnome 2 in favour of smarter defaults.

For what it is worth Ubuntu has removed the first run installer from the
gimp and I hope other distributions will follow suit (it is particularly
insane for Live CD based distributions to have configuration at startup).
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1012

> If you want some platform-independent code, the Gimp project may be a
> good source, as that user "first run" installer looks to be the same
> everywhere.

Hopefully a smart and almost completely automatic method can be
implemented by taking the DPI provided by the XServer as a
'recommendation' (but without trusting it so much as to get caught
out by disinformation).

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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