On Sat, 2025-06-21 at 08:35 +0000, Bob Marčan via users wrote: > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI > This might help. Welcome to the world where computer geeks did everything wrong... For years we specified computer font sizes in pixels, and pixels meant exactly one thing (the dots that made up the image). The resolution of the screen affected the actual font size, so you either chose larger/smaller fonts (which won't help with adjacent graphical images), or pretended that pixels meant something else (and suddenly pixel sizing became meaningless and had random results). This also worked with home printing, for those of you that remember dot matrix printing (pixel sizing was absolute, one pixel was one pixel, and its dot size related to your printer). And for many decades the printing world used points for font sizes, and points was an absolute size related to a fraction of a inch. You could specify 12 point or 60 point text, and everyone who printed knew exactly what that meant, and you got exactly the size of text you expected. That would have worked with screen fonts, except that someone decided that points meant something else. And now you get random results for specifying point sized text (or thinking that you are, because the font sizing gadget doesn't tell you if it's using wrong points or wrong pixels). When hi-definition screens came out, that was pretty-much the beginning of when no-nothing nerds redefined points and pixels into other meanings, and decided we also needed some sort of screen scaling factor to try and correlate graphics size to font size. While it's true that a scaling factor would help with some on-screen graphics, it compounded a variable font size with size-numbering that meant nothing and a screen-scaling factor that fought against each other. Made worse by the system doing one thing, and various apps (such as web browsers and some word processors) doing another. Rather than a scaling factor, what was really needed was an interface-sizing control. There's also the issue of projected size. Someone decided that 60 point text on something so-many feet away from you should be treated as some other size depending on your distance. Again, mis-using point size. If you actually worked in printing posters, point sizing is absolute (and standard), and you'd choose appropriately large font sizes than normal. And you should be doing the same with electronic billboards (choosing appropriate font sizes for the job), not pretending that 70 point text is something else depending on viewing distance. What should have happened is you configure your system for your real screen size, and its DPI. You'd specify your desired font sizing in points (knowing exactly how big 12 point text was, for instance), and it would calculate the right number of pixels to use when it scaled fonts to the absolute size you specified. And, you'd have a similar sizing option for the iconography in the GUI, hopefully with a preset to appropriately match the screen font size (which should, also, deal with the window graphics sizing - scroll bars, borders, etc). And, hey presto, you'd have readable text and clickable icons with a proper and predictable size to them. Of course you'd still have issues with photos embedded in pages, but that's a different thing and should have been handled separately (specifying picture size in a logical and coherent manner, not pretend pixels). But thanks to that mess, you'd have people with high-resolution screens running their computers in low resolution modes to get a usable-sized user-interface. We've probably all seen people using CRT and LCD monitors run that way. And users with midget interfaces when they use the full resolution of their monitor. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
