fonts in kate

Tue Jun 15 17:26:09 UTC 2021

On Tue, 15 Jun 2021 at 05:45, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:

> [I read your intent correctly] and yes it does

Oh good. :-)

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

Absolutely, yes.

> > If you have expert-level knowledge
>
> Oops - I'm already in trouble... :-)

:-D Well, I wanted to warn you!

> 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?

I can only say "it depends". If it's a general KDE (or desktop
environment) setting then it should be fine. The problem is, of
course, that the Arch wiki probably will not tell you if the stuff
they're discussing is cross-distro or not.

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

Cool. Yes, that's a good point. Sadly it's often needed.

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

I got mine 2nd hand from a friend. Lovely machine. I do not do any
real work on it -- it's my home computer and my G/F and I watch films
and TV shows on it, and that's about all. It is woefully underused.

> comps do binary...

Exactly. Multiplying by 2 in binary just means shifting all the bits
in the byte or word 1 place left (towards the most significant bit).
Dividing by 2 is 1 bit to the right.

> fractions are messy in binary...

*Grits teeth* not really.

If you scale 640*480 to 1280*960, it's a perfect fit: each pixel
becomes a square of 4.

If you scale 640*480 to 1280*1024, it doesn't fit exactly: for every 2
pixels there's 0.13 left over. So most are doubled but a few are
tripled and the image gets unevenly jaggy.

640*480 into 1366*768 (my work laptop's internal screen) doesn't fit
well at all and the picture will either be distorted or you get big
black bands.

Any app trying to display fixed-resolution bitmaps on a GUI that
supports fractional resolution scaling will suffer from this.

The _good_ thing is that if you have a Retina-display (generally held
to be ITRO 300dpi, when old 20th century screens were generally about
72dpi) is that yes you'll have jagged, unevenly-scaled pixels, but you
won't notice because the pixels are too small to see individually.

For example my old iPhone is a 6S+. This has a 1242×2208 display (in
portrait). iOS renders the screen image at only 414×736.

https://ios-resolution.com/

But you can't see that -- it looks very smooth.

Why? Well, the much lower res means a less-powerful GPU, making it
cheaper, cooler-running and making it last longer on a charge. It
saves money and power, and it runs faster.

With iOS and macOS, Apple can force vendors to update their apps and
simply prevent them running on newer releases of the OS unless they
display scalable graphics that will look nice.

KDE can't do that and has to support both old-style low-res (or
Standard Definition if you prefer) screens, and modern 4K and even 8K
screens, _and_ things in between like your screen -- 3840 x 2160 you
said. How big is it?

The big problem comes when you have 2+ screens. My built-in 13" is
1366×768. My central screen is a 22" at 1920×1080. My 3rd screen is a
portrait 24" screen also at 1920×1080.

None are HD. They're all SD but 3 *different* SDs, 2 similar, 1 very different.

So as you can immediately see, all 3 are different dpi. The 2 external
ones are close, only 9% different. The internal one is slightly over
half the size. So in Xfce when I drag a window onto the internal
screen, it suddenly gets much smaller.

The OS can detect the sizes of my external screens so it could adjust
things -- but as far as I know, at present, only GNOME 3, Cinnamon and
KDE support fractional scaling. Any X.org desktop should support
changing the dpi setting, but it's global -- it applies to all
screens.

That is no help to me. I'd like my internal screen at about 1⅓× and my
central landscape screen at 91% of the size of the portrait screen,
but not even KDE or GNOME can do that.

MacOS can. I think Windows 10 can with some limitations.

Linux will catch up some day but we might all have to move to Wayland first.

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

Well, kinda sorta. The first thing to do is change the OS' overall
setting, then you can see if it needs tweaks for some apps.

I don't know how big your 3840 x 2160 panel is, but for me, unless
that was really big (e.g. 30" +) I think I'd need window title bars
and the text in the GUI to be at least 1½× or 1¾× to be readable at
all.

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

Thank you. I appreciate that. :-)

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

Good luck...

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