Tim: >> Yep, you're stuffed, because the people providing those options haven't >> understood the situation properly (those who design font rendering >> engines, and those who get you to set font sizes in pixels in web >> browser configurations). I get the same thing (stupid font sizes). >> >> DPI means how many dots per inch, or pixels in that inch, will be used >> to draw the character (how smooth the edges are). It has *NOTHING* to >> do with how big the character should be drawn. Matthew Saltzman: > There's no magic about "points" either. There are 72 of them in an inch > and that's all one needs to know about them. True enough, yet some people don't get the idea that a point size is a physical, real world, measurement of size. It doesn't mean that the font should be sized in relation to pixel/dots size. i.e. 12 point text is the same size whether printed on paper or screen, if you're doing it right. And we get web authors doing stupid things, likewise for applications that print text to the screen. >> Geez, that problem was dealt with properly on printers ten years ago. >> Changing your printer from 24 DPI to 48 DPI, for example, didn't change >> the font sizes, unless the driver was written by a complete and utter >> moron. You just got smoother looking fonts, at the same size. > Right. The printer just doubled the number of dots in an inch--it slowed > dot-matrix printers to half speed and used twice as much ink. > > But the printer or its device-specific driver knows how wide/tall a sheet > of paper is and the DPI in any mode is fixed. So it's easy for the > printer or driver to know how many dots are in a point. Can we not preset the same information into X? I know you can configure the Gimp, and Mozilla (at least older versions), so it knew how many centimetres across the screen used how many pixels. Surely it's not too hard to configure X, itself, with a "my screen is x by y cms where the display is actually drawn" when setting it up. (Remembering that with PCs, a 17" monitor is a useless description, it measure the entire tube, not the usable part of it. And we have width and height scan controls on most CRTs.) > Displays can't change the number of dots in an inch. Oooh, yes and no... That rather depends on what you're referring to. With a CRT I can draw x number of dots across the screen, and it'd be using y dots per inch. I can also change that, on the same screen. It doesn't have to the same number of graphical pixels as phosphor dots. However, there's a point where you can't *individually* *resolve* each dot, but you can still draw smoother looking curves if you try it. It's not that far removed from 300 or 600 DPI printing. You cannot see each dot, but curved drawing do benefit from the finer detail. LCDs are another matter, you do have a hard limit on the lower resolution. > LCD displays have the additional ability to use the colored subpixels to > get even better effects. To be honest, I think that looks far worse than the anti-aliasing you get from a CRT, simply due to how the beam scans the phosphors. It smoothes the rough edges by having imperfect focus. LCDs, on the other hand, using the individual coloured pixels to attempt to get more resolution, ends up with strangely coloured text. It's like reading badly registered printing where they've not used pure black ink. -- (Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
