fontsize in 7.92

Adam Jackson ajackson at redhat.com
Tue Oct 23 13:06:20 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 00:39 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 20:48 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
> > Hi, 
> > On 10/22/07, Owen Taylor <otaylor at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > That also means BTW that when you change laptop again your text will
> > > > stay the same size regardless of the screen resolution, so you can
> > > > invest the time to find good settings you'll keep them a long time.
> > >
> > > I'd be interested in a pointer to the discussion that led to this policy
> > > change.
> > >
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378338
> > 
> > Federico blogged about it, too:
> > 
> > http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2007-01.html#font-sizes
> 
> I've now commented in great detail on the bug explaining a few of the
> reasons why I chose to hardcode 96dpi years ago. The situation has
> changed a bit (and there would be an argument to up the 96dpi to
> something higher), but most of the arguments against using the reported
> monitor DPI as the logical font DPI still hold.

The flipside of this is I also fixed the X server to report 100 by
default, because it's almost never 75 and extremely commonly 100, and
(as you noted on the bug) 75 is a bad DPI for fonts anyway because
there's just not enough pixels.

For what it's worth, I agree, DPI is not the right unit of measurement
for fonts.  You actually want dots per steradian (or square degree),
which is a measurement you have to infer from display usage since you
can't measure solid angle without knowing viewing distance.  In the
absence of any sort of policy to know this, it's probably better to just
choose a logical font DPI and stick with it.  The rasteriser still wants
to know the physical DPI so it can optimize subpixel coverage, but
that's a detail.

- ajax




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list