GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 608814
Handle separate DPI settings for multi-monitor
Last modified: 2011-03-03 21:39:18 UTC
I have 2 display, the main display (:0.0) with 132 dpi, the other (:0.1) with 96 dpi. /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi is set to the correct value for the main display (132 dpi). This mean that all textes are to big for the second display, the dpi setting for gconf apply to all screens. /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi shall not be a common registry value for all screen but shall be configurable for all screen separatelly.
Wrong component; this is not a gconf bug. Not sure where this belongs; trying gnome-settings-daemon.
I'm inclined to say this isn't a bug at all, but a feature request touching both g-s-d and the control-center.
This not a bug, this is a feature don't apply here, this a design error and therefore a bug. If the user has a second monitor (15" 1024x768 px) attached to ths system and the system dpi is 132, all texts will be 132/85 = 1,55 time bigger on the second monitor, this is not OK, An other case must also be considered, a speech is to be hold and the output device is a tv system with 1920x1080 px and 40". The screen has 55 ppi in this case. The character size seen by the public is dependent of the distance and the textes must all be scaled up by a large amount so that the DPI must be set to large value eg 450px in order to be readable by all people. Accordingly Gnome shall offer the possibility to set the font size according to the physical dpi of the displays or to a value configured manually.
There's no support for setting separate DPI values for separate monitors when their DPI is different.
We don't actually want to handle multi-monitor DPI, as this could cause varying font sizes when windows straddle over the 2 monitors. commit a49af89751057649034a42c511d2330d63bbfa6e Author: Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> Date: Thu Mar 3 17:16:42 2011 +0000 xsettings: Hard-code the default DPI We cannot rely on the X server giving us a decent DPI value, and we do not want to change the DPI when the resolution changes, or when multiple monitors are attached. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643704
Nice comment bur wrong. If we have 2 monitors with different dpi the fonts will not have the same size with the actual behavior. You can rely on the X server, if the values are not detected correctly, there is the possibility to put width and heigth winthin the xorg.conf file. According to the settings, both monitor can be handled as separate monitors or as a monitor with 2 separate screen. For the later case the user will have monitors with, normally the same datas (resolution and density). One DPI setting for all screens is wrong. Please reconsider this
The hard case is when a window overlaps two monitors. You can't draw half the window at one DPI for fonts and the other half at another DPI. The easy case is when a window is contained within a single monitor. In that case, you could conceivably have widgets that adjust to the monitor's resolution. However, that doesn't make sense for projectors, for example. You may want 10 points for text on a laptop which you view at arm's length, but 10 points on a projector is meaningless. Just live with the fact that pixels have different sizes in different monitors. If you are to present text to an audience, do your best to choose a good legible size.