Re: DPI, font size, and Debian

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 10:30:22AM -0600, Billy Biggs <vektor@dumbterm.net> wrote:
>   I think we agree on this.  My opinion was that either every display
> manager set the DPI in their config file (and that be the "one" place)
> or its done elsewhere.  Consensus seems to be to do it elsewhere.

Well, it has to be somewhere else, otherwise, we end up with the DPI
detected by X or set in the conffile being overridden, which is not
really what one would expect.

> > The first one would need more input. As I understand it (but it's only
> > with my limited experience of it), X fallsback to 75dpi when it can't
> > correctly detect display size. Wouldn't changing this fallback value
> > to 96dpi be a much more pleasant solution ?
> 
>   It's a good idea (I would be in support of this for sure).  However,
> my experience supporting users on IRC is that it is rare that X gets
> this far.  Usually DDC provides some values, and X will end up
> calculating anything between 80 and 133 DPI.  If we're talking about
> patches for the X server, I would like to see it default to 96 DPI, and
> not use DDC unless explicitly requested in the config file.

Well, if the user gets something 80 and 133, i would say they probably
got the right value. So what is wrong ? Probably the user not being
accustomed to the fact that the dpi setting actually works.  I've myself
been using a 75dpi setting for a *long* time, going up to editing the
?dm file to use 75 instead of the 100 default value. And now I think
about it, that was due to the fact that in my opinion, the 75dpi xfonts
were much pleasant to my eye than the 100dpi xfonts. So what ? my old
habit of ancient non ttf antialiased fonts made me use for quite some
time some inaccurate setting. Then I got a clue and used the real dpi
value of my monitor.
My point is people are probably still used to old stuff, and can't just
realize that the new setting they have is the actual correct one.
The typical error is using font sizes they're used to, being something
in-between 11 an 13pt, while the one they really want would be 8 or 9pt.

>   I think it would be productive to get this changed there, and we could
> use this as a migration plan.  In the mean time, I still think the Xft
> DPI change is the right thing to do in Debian until we have an X server
> with these modifications.

I think except the default fallback value, there's nothing to change but
people habits.

Mike