[Bf-committers] HiDPI notes for other OS'es

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

I had a look at this some months ago. For Windows there is a system
DPI that you can configure as a user and there's an API to query it.
It does not do this OS X trick with the 2x pixel size and decoupled
desktop coordinates, all coordinates are in actual pixels. Here's the
info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd464660(v=vs.85).aspx

There might be some unforeseen issues to solve but a Windows developer
might be able to get this working quickly with just a few changes in
the code.

On Linux I don't know what the solution is, I couldn't even get any
desktop environment configured to properly work on my MacBook Retina.
Typically the advice seems to be to make the fonts bigger, and tweak
some settings to make icons bigger, etc. But that alone doesn't make
things look and work quite right, many things are still too small then
and many applications don't follow these settings anyway. The problem
for us is that there seems to be no standard system wide DPI setting
that can be reliably used. Until there is a standard solution here I
guess this will remain something that the user has to configure
manually.

Brecht.

On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As I explained before, I made MacBook retina to work for HiDPI in the least intrusive way for our code. But I also had to do it in a way it would work for everyone.
>
> That meant I had to make two things work independently:
>
> - DPI scaling for UIs in general.
> - Apple's HiDPI implementation
>
> Unfortunately these two features were not following an identical specification. That meant I had to seperate it in a Mac-only value (Pixelsize for now) and DPI.
>
> For example, a retins "dot" is default set to be two pixels large. If you start Blender with 72 DPI, it will show visually the same button sizes whether you are in retina mode or not.
>
> An important design decision from Apple was to decouple Desktop coordinates from pixels.
> You can have retina desktops of 1024, 1440, 1920 "wide" which all get mapped to the actual 2880 screen pixels. But for each desktop width, a "dot" and standard line widths stay 2 pixels. Still following? :)
>
> Mind boggling... especially if you draw the whole UI in OpenGL.
>
> I'm still waiting for information how Linux or Windows will address HiDPI. Hopefully in the same way, but probably not...
>
> -Ton-
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
> Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
> Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands
>
>
>
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