Why EDID is not trustworthy for DPI

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Oct 5 20:17:27 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2011-10-05 at 15:56 -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:

> > > Are you saying fonts should change on the fly when I move an app between
> > > 2 monitors that have different DPIs ?
> > 
> > If they're sufficiently different in DPI, sure. Or would you really want
> > everything to suddenly become twice as small if you were moving a window
> > from a 100dpi monitor to a 200dpi one?
> 
> Are you also proposing to automatically resize all windows when you move
> them from one display to another ? There lies the road to disaster an
> pain imo.
> 
> At least untill all rendering is done with something like svg and not
> with absolute pixel values this is just going to be a very bad
> experience.

I'm more trying to think ahead about what's going to happen when our
current convenient assumptions break down than making specific technical
proposals. It just doesn't seem to me like a winning strategy to keep
working on the basis that we can simply assume one notional DPI for all
displays; sooner or later, given where display technology is going, this
is likely to break down. (Unless we just go with what happened when we
switched from 72dpi to 96dpi, I guess: wait until some arbitrary
'tipping point' in the adoption of hi-res displays and then say 'okay,
new notional dpi is 200, get used to it'. But there may be too long of
an overlap period for that to be practical.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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