fonts in kate

[rikona]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 22:26:04 +0200
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 at 18:01, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for that! An excellent site that puts a lot of stuff in
> > context, even the need to reboot. :-) The best single site I've
> > seen for this topic. The Arch site seems to have a lot of good
> > info, well presented. You've mentioned Arch before, with good
> > results.  Maybe that should be my go-to site for problems...  
> 
> The Arch Wiki is industry-leading and as such a great source of
> information.
> 
> This is not a dig, but if you work on improving your Google-fu, then
> you will often find, as I do, that a well-crafted Google query will
> offer the Arch wiki a sa

[I read your intent correctly] and yes it does

> The thing that you must remember at all times is that while the Arch
> wiki is superb at explaining what happens and why it happens and what
> you can do, it is solely intended as a reference tool for Arch Linux.
> Anything that it tells you about config files, or file locations, or
> dependencies, or libraries, or whatever, may either not help you with
> Ubuntu, may cause you to break your OS very badly, or may lead you up
> a blind alley.

understood  - this is also true of non-arch sites too - older,
different configs, etc may still not work on my box. 

> It may tell you to check a setting in a file, but that file does not
> exist on Ubuntu – or does but is in a different location, or has a
> different name, or both. Or Ubuntu might use an older version, and
> that *might*  use different settings, so you will find the file, in
> the state place, and with similar contents to what the Arch wiki says
> -- and then if you change a line that the Arch Wiki recommends, you
> will break your PC because Ubuntu doesn't understand that setting.
> 
> So yes, it's a great source of info, but a very poor and occasionally
> actively dangerous source of guidance or suggestions for a totally
> different distro.

understood

> If you have expert-level knowledge

Oops - I'm already in trouble... :-)

> , then it's possible to read it,
> understand the problem, mentally translate the instructions into those
> for the distro you're working on, and use the answer. But unless
> you're very confident indeed, *and* know *both* Arch and your desired
> distro inside-out, and know the differences, and know how to
> translate, then DO NOT TRY TO FOLLOW SPECIFIC CHANGE INSTRUCTIONS
> RECOMMENDED BY THE ARCH WIKI.

For OS stuff, I wouldn't. But how about the app-specific fixes on Arch
that address helping the app to do things like fractional scaling, for
example? Are they not likely to work with another OS?

> So, as I said, use it as general troubleshooting advice. Use it to
> find keywords to improve your Google query.
> 
> If you googled for
> 
> x.org kde 5.21 dpi setting ubuntu
> 
> ... and you got a link to the Arch wiki, then you know that that query
> was not specific enough, and you might need, say,
> 
> x.org kde 5.21 dpi setting "ubuntu" -arch

I do play with  the query a lot - even include dates, to avoid the bad
info often seen on older Ubuntu sites. :-)

> > As I'm finding out. :-( Looks like both system and app tweaks may be
> > necessary. This may be how Apple makes it "just work". I naively
> > thought I'd just get a better monitor and everything would look
> > better.  
> 
> There are 2 issues.
> 
> [1] Apps scaling to match the DPI setting
> [2] Apps obeying *fractional* DPI settings
> 
> E.g. right now I'm looking at my iMac's  5,120-by-2,880 display.

They reeeally do look nice. Photos are amazing. I don't do enough video
to appreciate the display of those, though.

> I am also trying to install Alpine Linux in a VirtualBox VM. The
> default window size for the VM is 640*480, which looks a bit like a
> postage stamp on this 27" screen.

:-) :-) :-) 

> If I scale it to 200% it's easy. VBox displays 2 pixels for every
> pixel on the virtual screen. Multiplying by 2 is trivially easy and so
> very fast for a computer (and in principle you should immediately know
> *why* this is. If you don't, then you will for similar reasons
> probably not be able to spot why some advice on the Arch wiki will be
> dangerous to Ubuntu users).

comps do binary...

> I could also scale it by 3. That makes it a bigger size still, but is
> slower. It may not be obvious why but if you think about why doubling
> is easy, you will understand.
> 
> But if I scale it by 125% or 275% (also options), then some things
> will get jagged and ugly. This is because in places it can display 2
> pixels but in other only 1, and so the scaling won't be consistent and
> things will change shape.

fractions are messy in binary...

> When KDE doubles the pixels on screen,  it's easy. Things get bigger
> in a uniform way but they look more jagged. If it scales it by 1.5
> instead of by 2, though, it's much harder work. All apps need to know
> that when they display a triangle, they can't display a bitmap that is
> 200 pixels across at the base and 198 pixels the line about and 196 on
> the line above that. They need to send commands saying draw a line
> from position #1 to this position #2, then to position #3, then to
> fill the resulting shape with colour 0x34fcab.
> 
> This is a very different set of operations and apps have to be
> specifically written to work this way. Old ones won't be because for
> decades all screens were 72dpi, that's it, the end. So you could plonk
> pixels and bitmaps on the screen and they'd look right. Not any more.
> And a lot of apps need to do a lot of work before this will work as
> expected.

This is why I thought I'd need app fixes in addition to OS fixes...

Thanks for the explanations. Yours are always clear and informative,
and much appreciated.

Now, on to the task of trying to get Kubuntu, with all its pgms from
everywhere, to look almost as good as the mac... :-)