Font DPI and screen scaling

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Sunday June 07 2020 22:39:51 Frank Steinmetzger wrote:

>    “People usually scale their UI by forcing a DPI value in font settings.
>    This is wrong and they should use screen scaling instead.”

This is actually wrong as a statement. By changing the font DPI value you control only those parts of the UI that are scaled to text that should be rendered inside, aligned or whatever. Personally I think that's the appropriate approach if you want to be able to read displayed text without needing a magnifier but also want to take advantage of your big screen. What's the point of paying for a large hires screen if it will show the same amount of information as a lowly 1024x768 screen?


Incidentally, X just works with pixel and pixel co-ordinates, all the scaling magic happens in higher level specialised libraries (like freetype) and "middleware" (fQt, GTk, ...)

Other than that I don't really have an answer for you, but I do have an additional question: are you planning to run your applications only locally or will you also be using your computers as remote X11 terminals? In the latter case the problem becomes near impossible to solve: the software will use the DPI or scaling settings from the computer they're running on, not the ones for the display they're rendering to.

R