Re: 100dpi, 75dpi, unscaled ?
dave selby <dave_arahan@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> Debian has a lot of fonts .... what is the difference between
>
> /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi
> /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled,
>
> I cant find any .. can someone enlighten me ? Do I need both ?
If I ask for
-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-110-100-100-*-*-iso8859-1
but there are only 10 and 12 point Helvetica fonts in
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi (I asked for 11.0 point), the :unscaled
version won't return a font at all, but the not-unscaled one will try
to scale one or the other to the requested size. This is bad with
bitmapped fonts, since you don't wind up with smooth edges (or even
consistent-width lines, often).
> Also if I have the 100dpi versions, is there any advantage to having the
> 75dpi versions, are these just less memory intensive versions of the same
> thing ?
It's not memory, it's how big your screen is. Try this exercise: take
the horizontal resolution of your display, divide by .8, and divide
again by the diagonal size of your monitor in inches. If this number
is closer to 75, the 75dpi fonts are closer to accurate for you; if
it's closer to 100, the 100dpi fonts are better. In any case you can
be happy with scalable (Type 1 or TrueType) fonts. "Happiness" here
is relative, too, it's really how much you care about a "12 point"
font being exactly 1/6 inch tall.
(It turns out that X does have a concept of display pitch, and
'xdpyinfo' will tell you this, among many other things. The last time
I looked at an X server source, though, X would only hand out 75 or
100 dpi fonts unless you asked really nicely [e.g., with explicit
resolutions in the font name]; modern XFree86 might be different. I
think the newer font-rendering libraries try to use the reported
display resolution. Getting this sort of thing right can be tricky,
but as I understand it, the Unix world has a lot more hope than
Windows...)
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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