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  • Fonts: was: [gentoo-user] New monitor, new problem. Everything LARGE O_

    From Jack@21:1/5 to Mark Knecht on Mon Jul 8 00:00:01 2024
    On 2024.07.07 17:06, Mark Knecht wrote:
    [snip...]
    So I understand the 14% calculation, but help me understand the
    underlying
    technology. Is the DPI how a font file, which I presume is some fixed
    size,
    like 25x25, gets scaled onto the screen? I'm not clear about the
    conversion
    from the font to the number of dots used to draw the font on the
    screen.
    When a program requests the system to display a character on the
    screen, depending on the specific font and the available font-drawing libraries, it can specify the size either in dots or some physical
    measure - inches, or more likely points. Points are an "ancient"
    measure from the times of using real, lead type, stored in wooden
    cases, thus upper [capital letters] and lower [everything else] case.
    There are 72 points to the inch. 10 point type is 10/72" tall, but
    with enough spacing between rows, you typically get 6 rows per inch.
    (Sorry for being pedantic - many years ago I did spend some time
    printing with hand set type.)

    To how fonts are designed, many if not most modern fonts (such as
    true-type) are specified internally by the commands to draw each
    character, and you request the size in points. The conversion to how
    many pixels to use is based on the DPI the system thinks is being used
    by the monitor. Some fonts are actually specified by the Width x
    Height in pixels. These are bitmap fonts, which often come in sets of various sizes. Fortunately (as far as I can tell) there are fewer and
    fewer bitmap fonts in use any more, as they need to get very larger for higher DPI displays. You can imagine that mixing the two is even more
    likely to lead to confusion and poor looking display, unless you are extremely careful.

    With my limited understanding it seems very arbitrary.
    Not so arbitrary, but easily confusing.

    With respect to Dale's "huge" problem there's also a scale factor in
    KDE
    that can be set by the user, or could be set wrong such that it will
    scale
    up what's drawn on the screen. (Display and Monitor->Global Scale)
    And I'm really not sure where this scaling is applied relative the the
    points to pixels calculation of font size.

    Hope this helps more than confuses.

    Jack

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  • From Nuno Silva@21:1/5 to Jack on Tue Jul 9 10:50:01 2024
    On 2024-07-07, Jack wrote:

    To how fonts are designed, many if not most modern fonts (such as
    true-type) are specified internally by the commands to draw each
    character, and you request the size in points. The conversion to how
    many pixels to use is based on the DPI the system thinks is being used
    by the monitor. Some fonts are actually specified by the Width x
    Height in pixels. These are bitmap fonts, which often come in sets of various sizes. Fortunately (as far as I can tell) there are fewer and
    fewer bitmap fonts in use any more, as they need to get very larger for higher DPI displays. You can imagine that mixing the two is even more
    likely to lead to confusion and poor looking display, unless you are extremely careful.

    That's funny, because in my experience the fonts that render poorly are
    the non-bitmap ones, and often the best way to get a clear, crisp,
    readable text display here is by using bitmap fonts.

    Now I'd like to know why are non-bitmap ones so often rendering
    poorly. While I've tried to explore settings in the past, I don't think
    I've discovered a satisfactory set of settings for non-bitmap. Maybe
    some day in the future I'll revisit this...

    --
    Nuno Silva

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