Vladimir Prus wrote:
Stefan Seefeld wrote:
Then I don't understand what you said before. You said you expect that printing of portion of screen should preserve dimenstions. Do you mean dimensions in millmeters or in what unit? And why do you expect for them to be preserved on paper?
Yes, I'm talking about physical dimensions (millimeters, whatever). Why should I *not* expect it to preserve its size ?
Whenever I print a web page, the width of paper is different from the browser window width.
Indeed, which makes designing web sites particularly challenging. However, web sites typically contain a lot of text, which can be reflown to fit on different media, so here, too, the solution is to use layout, not scale.
Let me rephrase that a bit: the application asks the display server for a region of suitable size, such that all it wants to draw will fit in. This size requirement will be a fuction of the size of the graphical elements they lay inside (and, I reiterate, which generally should have physical dimensions).
Say, scrollbar is 5mm on my screen. Will that be good on a handheld computer? I doubt that. And how do you determine preferred physical size of scrollbar? Should it be 10cm or 5mm? You can't answer this question without knows the size of the drawing surface, so maybe scrollbar width should drawing_surface_width*some_fraction
You raise interesting questions. I think it is an error to try to solve the challenge to design a GUI for different output media (devices) in terms of scale. It is not because you scale your widgets down that you make a graphical application usable on a PDA. Rather, the GUI 'style' should be adapted to the output device in that case. This is another argument for applications not to rely on a particular GUI style, at least not if they are meant to be portable across devices. High-resolution devices could use a GUI with much more detail than low-resolution devices. I'd even go further and try to abstract away much of the widgetry into high-level 'tasklets' that can be implemented specifically for particular output- (and input-, i.e. mouse, pen, keyboard, glove, etc.) devices. If a user's GUI can be described semantically in terms of 'tasks', its GUI can be much more flexibly replaced to adjust to particular hardware. But that gets us into quite a different discussion.
Yes, but what does that prove? The preferred size of text is set by the user, who certainly cares only about physical size, but on a specific monitor. If he buys a different monitor with different size and resolution, it's not at all clear he'll want to retain the same physical size of the text. He might want to make it large, or smaller, depending on preferences.
Quite right. Yet, it is the user, and he would rather think about size, not resolution. :-)
Going back to scrollbar -- I think it's width should also be customisable by the user vis some config tool. And if user hasn't specified anything, percentage of screen width looks better to me than any "natural" 5mm. Any constant you'll hardcode will be just that -- hardcoded constant.
Well, it's a constant in the context of a GUI style. You can still a) replace / modify the style b) scale a graphic to zoom in / out Regards, Stefan