On 2006/11/12 01:20 (GMT-0500) Christian Montoya apparently typed: > On 11/11/06, Felix Miata <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On 2006/11/11 22:17 (GMT-0500) Christian Montoya apparently typed: >> Please explain what you mean by bad scaling. > What I meant was that you can scale all of the native windows text > (menus, title bars, icons) to accommodate the laptop's ideal settings > (120 dpi, 1680x1050 pixels), but you can't scale the actual window > text of all apps. That's poor app design, probably due in most cases to inadequate tools in the most commonly used programming apps. > It's a big problem because at this "ideal" setting, > all the text is actually too small to comfortably read. So Internet > Explorer scales text, and Opera does too, as well as some Windows > apps, but Firefox doesn't FF doesn't as a part of a trade off of offering the user the finer grained control of his preference size that px offers over pt. They're one and the same if you're only doing 72 DPI, but at twice that, 144, px gives twice the control. FF doesn't adhere to the everything that can be automatic must be automatic school of design inherent in the windoz way of doing things. FF scales perfectly fine, as long as the user plays his part in determining the scale - actually going into the tools menu and setting a default to suit his own preference. Look at these to get an idea how close FF & IE can be matched up: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/ptdemo-096dpi-XP.gif http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/ptdemo-120dpi-XP.gif http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/ptdemo-144dpi-XP.gif http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/ptdemo-192dpi-XP.gif Note that at 192 DPI FF has a rounding problem, leading it to report an erroneous DPI. > A lot of it has to do with the fact that while these computers come > with support for 120 dpi, they don't come with adequate support for > font-scaling to match 120 dpi at the maximum, factory-shipped display > setting. In the end, the 120 dpi, 1680x1050 screen is pretty, but also > pretty useless. Not with KDE on Linux. Linux desktops continuously evolve, so you could have had it nice since you bought it, as well as long ago, and you still can if you don't mind using a non-monopoly OS that you need not pay any money to get. XP is rather brain dead handling high resolution. It was designed roughly 6 years ago. Vista should catch M$ up, and solve the problem for apps designed with variable resolution and DPI in mind. >> What is "it", and how to you "patch" it? > Well, first step was to go down to 1280x800 pixels, and then install a > Dell patch to turn the poor image-scaling in IE off (which was > terribly pixelated), and then I know there are some more steps that > can be taken to stop font-scaling in IE and Opera altogether, but I > just decrease the zoom in them slightly and they look fine. You can't see a good image displayed from information that doesn't exist. Displaying images closer to their intrinsic size just masks the lack of information (excessive compression for your environment). >> It isn't about 120 DPI. It's about DPIs that vary more than a little >> from whatever the page designer uses or assumes. Average DPIs have on >> their way up for quite some time, and won't be stopping any time soon. > True, but considering how bad Windows XP handles 120 dpi, I'm not > about to put all the blame on the page designer. Web pages need be no problem in this regard, as long as image sizes are adequate. That's a balancing act that works hard against POTS users and sites that are graphics heavy, but pages can be perfectly gorgeous on high quality (e.g. high resolution/tiny px) screens. All it takes is two basic things: adequate image sizes, and CSS sizing using relative measurements exclusively. There's little any OS or a web browser can do to compensate if the designer won't do what he can do that needs doing. -- "Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven." Matthew 5:12 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
