Re: HiDPI and fractional scaling

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;


On 3 February 2014 04:24, Arun Raghavan <arun accosted net> wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm typing this from my Sony Vaio Pro 13. The resolution on this thing
> is 1920x1080 on a 13" display, putting it at about 160 dpi, so I don't
> get any automatic scaling love.

you shouldn't get any automatic surface scaling anyway: you may have a
high DPI display than nominal (tho not by much), but your resolution
does not warrant scaling up every surface. as an example, even if you
scaled with a non-integer factor, all media players would need to
disregard the scaling factor in order to play 1080p contents at full
screen.

the definition of "high DPI display" is pretty much the one where a
display's native resolution can be halved (or divided by 4, etc.)
while the perceived resolution is still pretty much sane. the MacBook
Pro Retina display, for instance, has a native resolution of
2880x1800, which can be halved to get a perceived 1440x900 one. if we
halved your display's resolution, we'd have a 960x540 resolution,
which is pretty much useless.

instead of automatic scaling on every single surface, you want to use
the text scaling factor — as you correctly noted. still on X11 is
going to be pretty painful (if not borderline impossible) to ever
support per-display scaling factors.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/