Fonts (Firefox/Windows & Firefox/Linux)

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Font sizing choosers (web browsers, for your desktop, or whatever)
>> should not ask you to choose a font size in pixels.  That's the real
>> bug.

Tom Horsley:
> Not really - the gnome fonts are mostly set to something like 10 points
> (not pixels), but if you literally render a 10 point font on a 42 inch
> display it comes out so small you can't read it (because, for one thing,
> I'm not sitting as close to a 42 inch display as I would be to a 20
> inch monitor - but the EDID info in the monitor doesn't know how
> far away I am :-).

Doesn't matter.  12 point text on the display is 12 point text on the
display, screen, paper, whatever..., no matter how far away from it you
are.  It's a fixed size.

> Lying about the DPI is merely the simplest way to make the fonts readable.

True enough, but that's why we have problems.  People bodge up the wrong
thing to solve a problem that's not being addressed.  In doing so, they
make it impossible to use the system properly, as everyone starts to
depend on the broken system.

To make matters worse, they don't all use the same bodge in the same
way.  So you end up using 56 pixel text on your browser, to get 12 point
sized text.  Then the next program that you use has some other pixel
sized text, to get it to the same size.

Then you find other issues...  Once you get fonts sort of how you can
cope with them, you find your DTP software's useless for putting a 2 cm
box on the page, or text 2 cm down and 4 cm across, etc, because it
can't actually tell what 2 cm is.

There's only one correct answer.  You would configure the display
correctly, i.e. accurately.  Then you pick appropriate sized fonts for
how you use the display.  Naturally this depends on the whole thing
working correctly, without stupidities from the screen rendering and
browser rendering software.

It'd "just work" if programmers didn't do stupid things with fonts and
DPI.  Can't see that happening, though...   :-\

No, this isn't just theoretical.  I've gone through merry hell, in the
past, trying to write up documentation with diagrams and illustrations,
because the measuring systems were all inconsistent.

-- 
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