Tim: >> Font sizing choosers (web browsers, for your desktop, or whatever) >> should not ask you to choose a font size in pixels. That's the real >> bug. Tom Horsley: > Not really - the gnome fonts are mostly set to something like 10 points > (not pixels), but if you literally render a 10 point font on a 42 inch > display it comes out so small you can't read it (because, for one thing, > I'm not sitting as close to a 42 inch display as I would be to a 20 > inch monitor - but the EDID info in the monitor doesn't know how > far away I am :-). Doesn't matter. 12 point text on the display is 12 point text on the display, screen, paper, whatever..., no matter how far away from it you are. It's a fixed size. > Lying about the DPI is merely the simplest way to make the fonts readable. True enough, but that's why we have problems. People bodge up the wrong thing to solve a problem that's not being addressed. In doing so, they make it impossible to use the system properly, as everyone starts to depend on the broken system. To make matters worse, they don't all use the same bodge in the same way. So you end up using 56 pixel text on your browser, to get 12 point sized text. Then the next program that you use has some other pixel sized text, to get it to the same size. Then you find other issues... Once you get fonts sort of how you can cope with them, you find your DTP software's useless for putting a 2 cm box on the page, or text 2 cm down and 4 cm across, etc, because it can't actually tell what 2 cm is. There's only one correct answer. You would configure the display correctly, i.e. accurately. Then you pick appropriate sized fonts for how you use the display. Naturally this depends on the whole thing working correctly, without stupidities from the screen rendering and browser rendering software. It'd "just work" if programmers didn't do stupid things with fonts and DPI. Can't see that happening, though... :-\ No, this isn't just theoretical. I've gone through merry hell, in the past, trying to write up documentation with diagrams and illustrations, because the measuring systems were all inconsistent. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
