Why EDID is not trustworthy for DPI

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Oct 5 20:34:43 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2011-10-05 at 21:31 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 12:31:50PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > Like I replied to ajax, I suspect when the problem of assuming
> > everything's 96dpi becomes simply too acute, instead of fixing
> > everything really properly so that all displays correct report their
> > size and all desktops actually do resolution independence perfectly so
> > it doesn't _matter_ if one of your displays is 98dpi and the other is
> > 215dpi, everything still looks perfect, the industry will just wind up
> > with a slightly more sophisticated bodge where we have a few 'standard'
> > resolutions and just figure out which one your displays are closest to.
> > But that's still going to require some kind of sensible handling of the
> > case where one monitor is roughly 100dpi and the other is roughly
> > 200dpi, unless we simply say 'you can't do that, all your displays have
> > to be in the same DPI Category'.
> 
> Sure, in the future when we have font renderers that run in GPU shaders 
> we can think about whether there's a plausible way to make applications 
> work when they have to deal with multiple DPIs simultaneously. But we 
> don't have any technology that can do any of that at the moment, and so 
> the simple fact is that right now the decision to have gnome run at 
> 96dpi regardless of the output is an entirely rational one and anyone 
> who argues otherwise gets to explain how all the difficult bits would 
> work. The end.

I'm just saying it would probably pay off to put some thought *now* into
how to manage things when higher resolution displays become so prevalent
that they can't be ignored, rather than desperately scrambling to catch
up when you eventually realize it's happened.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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