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

[sllewbj blueyonder co uk (Joe Wells (reverse mailbox letters only for non-public replies))]

Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie> writes:

> > 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.

A "first run" installer would certainly not solve the problem I am
reporting, which is that Gnumeric documents that work on one X display
fail when Gnumeric is run on the same machine but using a different X
display.  You certainly can not expect two different X displays to
have the same dpi values.  That is why the X server should be queried
for what it thinks its dpi values are.

> 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).

Some library used by Gnumeric already *is* trusting this dpi value!
So unless you have some way to stop this library from using the X
server's reported dpi, then the main body of Gnumeric must also trust
it to keep the size of various displayed things consistent.

-- 
Joe