Re: DPI, font size, and Debian
Simon Law (sfllaw@debian.org):
> On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 07:27:50PM -0600, Billy Biggs wrote:
> > I would like to act on the proposal described in the web page, that
> > is, get everyone to ship with X starting at a default DPI of 96x96,
> > and have fontconfig changed to default to this as well.
>
> I must respectfully disagree.
>
> We really should get around to becoming "modern" and do
> resolution-independent widgets. And so a fixed DPI will undermine
> this attempt.
>
> Having the DPI value actually reflect the number of dots per inch, and
> scaling our widgets with it will let us have well-rendered _smooth_
> fonts instead of the blurry ones we have now.
>
> Who wants to have itty-bitty fonts and icons when we get monitors that
> can display 3200x2400? Let's find reasonable sizes for widgets and
> then make them scale with the capabilities of high-resolution
> displays.
Simon,
I am merely proposing that the default DPI value of Debian systems be
set to 96 DPI for all users. This does not prevent it being configured
by the user later on.
High resolution displays are definitely interesting and will probably
require changes in a lot of areas, not just font sizes. I am not
against scalable UIs either. What I am trying to do with my proposal is
solve an awkward technical problem of how the default DPI is set on
Debian systems.
Right now, GNOME users default to 96 DPI, xdm users default to 100
DPI, and other users are randomly assigned DPIs anywhere in the range of
75-133. I believe that right now, we should adopt the GNOME standard
everywhere as the default value for DPI.
-Billy
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