High resolution displays and GNOME [LWN.net]

High resolution displays and GNOME

Posted Aug 8, 2013 9:19 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131)
Parent article: High resolution displays and GNOME

PDFs can be made to look good at any DPI and zoom level. Why are user interfaces different? Is it only because there still are (legacy) rasterized icons?

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High resolution displays and GNOME

Posted Aug 8, 2013 19:45 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

Pretty much. Once upon a time, the NeXT computer used "Display Postscript" to construct user-interface elements, dimensioned in points. The approach was a rousing success; the company, less so, but for other reasons. Icons are just specialized characters (with colors!) that could be represented much the same way, and wrangled with the same code.

High resolution displays and GNOME

Posted Aug 13, 2013 16:42 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

Didn't the original Sun Windows from SunOS 4 also use Display Postscript. The major problem was that both NeXT and Sun (and the other Unix vendors) had the patent and other rights to use Postscript under proprietary licenses with Adobe which made using it in MIT/X or similar things impossible. [Each OS doing so also implemented it in a way that you couldn't get it to work on another system with some sort of "Display Postscript" which ended its usefulness for hackers.]

High resolution displays and GNOME

Posted Aug 13, 2013 17:32 UTC (Tue) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

You're thinking of NeWS.

High resolution displays and GNOME

Posted Aug 15, 2013 21:19 UTC (Thu) by solenskiner (guest, #67077) [Link]

I believe the idea lives on in OSX, just using PDF instead of DPS.