“If you are running a screen resolution of 1366×768 on a tablet, chances are that UI will look good at 100% DPI settings. But what about when you connect that tablet to an external high resolution display? In Windows 8 you can choose either 100% to optimize the UI on the tablet display or up to 150% to optimize the UI on the external display. You have to compromise. Windows 8.1 takes care of this issue by supporting per-display DPI scaling.” That’s pretty cool. Do other systems support this?
I looked around for a reference and I found this, talking about hiDPI support for Gnome. He mentions using different scaling factors for different outputs.
The link is http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/06/28/hidpi-support-in-gnome/
I’m still amazed the DPI problem wasn’t fixed 10+ years ago.
It was… X11 has had DPI support for a long time, and it will even calculate the DPI on its own by querying it from the monitor (assuming the monitor provides that information, some don’t because windows ignores it).
No. You may want to look at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23705 and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41115.
Because there were no high dpi displays….
Of course there were – maybe not as high DPI as there are now (Though, I’m sure there were), but there was certainly significant variability, especially since CRTs were still very common then. I ran dual 19″ displays at 1600×1200 in those days – most 19″ displays didn’t look that great at that resolution, but mine did. If they were lower quality monitors, well, you’d run at a different resolution, until you found the setting that was still sharp.
X has had support for per-display DPI since pretty much forever.
I can’t find a useful link. Please, would you be so kind to help? The naive way “xrandr –output … –dpi …” doesn’t work for me – it always sets DPI for all monitors 🙁
Well, I don’t know if xrandr supports it but I’m pretty sure you can configure it in xorg.conf.
Never said it was easy to configure…
Interesting.
Could a similar concept be used to cope with the range of dpi found in existing devices?
So still, you’ve just got this coarse adjustment factor. They give an example of where they manage to get calc.exe to be about the same effective size on screen across widely different monitor DPIs.
Why the hell isn’t it possible to get the size EXACTLY the same. Let me enter the DPI of each monitor, and then a configuration option that says “I want x pixels to equal one inch of screen”. Then every UI element appears to be exactly the same effective size on all monitors, and windows handle the scaling math based on the desired DPI versus native DPI.
OS X supports “retina” (2x scaling) and regular displays together.
(so far, of course, the only “retina” display it knows about is the internal display of Retina MacBooks)
We used scalable UI’s on the Amiga 20 years ago…