high resolutionn/tiny fonts

[Felix Miata]

Clay Weber composed on 2014-11-09 05:19 (UTC-0500):

> I recently upgraded my laptop's screen to one with a higher resolution.

> https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?t=66766

> This little top on dpi settings helped me, as simply increasing font sizes
> made things look odd and out of place, while adjusting screen resolution
> made things less clear, less sharp. It seems that an LCD has a native
> resolution that it works best with, as compared to the old crt monitors.

Oshunluvr's post mentioned "correct" DPI. In the context he used, the better
word would be "accurate". Those two words don't necessarily mean the same
thing. Accurate has a clear meaning. Do the math, and the result won't vary.
Correct actually depends personal on point of view, the display's physical
DPI, font smoothing (or lack thereof) and various characteristics that don't
necessarily change in linear fashion as the DPI actually used is varied. In
short, subjective factors affect what could be termed correct.

One of those characteristics is fonts. Most are optimized for the traditional
Windows default of 96 DPI that most DEs, and by default X itself, assume. It
turns out that optimization works equally well for any multiple of 24 that is
96 or more, almost as well for any multiple of 12 that is 96 or more,
slightly less well for any multiple of 8 that is 96 or more, still less well
for a multiple of 4 that is 96 or more, and so on. Numbers best avoided are
those like 103 and 111, because if you're sensitive to fonts, very likely you
won't like the way nominal font sizes increment in physical size. On a page
like http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Font/fonts-comps-droid.html the expectation is
that the slope of the line ends is rather straight, with linear distinctions
in physical size according to nominal size, but that won't necessarily happen
if the DPI value isn't one of the higher multiples.

All that said, with significantly higher DPI displays, individual glyphs have
so many more pixels that whether DPI is a happy multiple disappears.
Disregarding the effects of font smoothing, a typical 12pt font at 96 DPI on
average has 128 (16 tall by 8 wide) pixels per glyph at most to work with.
Increase the DPI to 120, 25%, and it jumps to 200 (20 tall by 10 wide), 56%
more. Not likely the difference between 168 and 171 would be detectable, but
between 108 (evenly divisible by 12) and 111 (not evenly divisible by 2, 4,
8, 12 or 24) it should be to any with median or better vision.

IOW, don't be afraid to use DPI to make your DE objects, including fonts,
bigger, as long as you stick to one of the happy multiples. Likely the result
will be more pleasing than naively going for accurate, or sticking with the
96 default.
-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/