Re: 100dpi, 75dpi, unscaled ?
On Friday 14 March 2003 02:44, David Z Maze wrote:
> 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...)
Many thanks for helping to clear things up, it starts to make a bit more
sense ... Do you know of a web page where I can read up in more detail ?
Dave
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