Display Scaling

Posted Aug 14, 2024 21:06 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Display Scaling by Nikratio
Parent article: COSMIC desktop makes its debut

Fonts are easy, as they were largely designed to be scalable from the outset. Which leaves... everything else.

The problem can be summed up with this question: Is the intent for "high resolution" to "fit more stuff on screen" or "fit the same stuff, only crisper"?

In the past, it was nearly always the former, but now it's increasingly the latter.

Those two intents require very different approaches to how you go about things, and which applies depends on both the application and the user preferences.

Meanwhile. Do all elements of your application have awareness of the pixels-per-inch resolution of the screen? Which ones are handled by the application, and which are provided by external toolkits? Which should be rendered at a higher resolution and which ones should be linearly scaled? Is your application layout specified with pixel-based positioning, or something else? Etc etc.

(BTW, from what I recall, back in the "good old X days" all sorts of stuff went quite wonky if you told X that you were not using the default of 96dpi. Because the _font_ dpi wasn't the same as the _server_ dpi. So no, this wasn't ever a properly solved problem)