Panel resizing

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Nov 15, 2007, at 8:02 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
> ...
>> Furthermore the font size should not change. If you choose to have a
>> larger font the panel will be larger automatically.
>
> That seems to be what everyone's leaning towards.  Should we be
> specifying the panel size in points instead of pixels?
> ...

I think that would be a sensible long-term goal. You shouldn't be aware 
of the exact number of pixels used when your screen displays something, 
any more than you are aware of the exact number of dots used when your 
printer prints something.

However, with current displays pixels *are* still noticable, and this 
is likely to continue for the next decade or so. A 20pt panel on a 
90ppi display would be 25px; on a 100ppi display it would be 28px; and 
on a 110ppi display it would be 31px. If the panel icons are 
Tango-style (or Human-style) and optimized for 22px*22px, they'll look 
bad when resized (or left unresized!) for slightly larger panel sizes, 
even if they're SVG.

So to avoid the panel looking ugly at different resolutions, I think 
you'll need a couple of other things first. An icon style that is 
robust at all sizes from 16px*16px upward (so, for example, it doesn't 
feature 1-pixel strokes). And a smart image-resizing algorithm, that 
can shrink (large) icons so they don't look blurry at any size.

To make things other than the panel resolution-independent is quite a 
bit more complicated, but that's another story.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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