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

[Brecht Van Lommel]

It's not a reliable value to use, because it's not correctly reported
by many monitors, and does not actually correspond to the DPI assumed
by any other UI toolkit. I've looked for the right value for quite a
while, but only conclusion I can find is that none of
Gnome/KDE/Xfce/GTK/Qt/.. have proper high DPI support on Linux/X11,
it's just not implemented. If one of them did we could copy the same
mechanism to detect DPI.

On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Dan McGrath <danmcgrath.ca at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Brecht,
>
> Note sure if it would help, but on Linux for X dpi, perhaps these
> options might be of help?:
>
>         Option         "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
>         Option         "DPI" "96x96"
>
> I need them in my xorg.conf here, but in my case, it is because my
> monitor reports poor info. Anyways, just a side thought since you
> mentioned. o/
>
>
> Dan
>
> On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 9:51 AM, Brecht Van Lommel
> <brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:
>> 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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