Dave Harris wrote:
In-Reply-To: <4342AC3C.1060100@sympatico.ca> seefeld@sympatico.ca (Stefan Seefeld) wrote (abridged):
Exactly. To be clear: moving from a 15" to a 17" monitor would, in my ideal world, have *no* impact on the physical size of the displayed graphics, but rather, would add ~ 1.4" in both dimensions to the useful screen area. How many pixels your display has then only affects the quality of the rendering, exactly as what you were looking for.
Isn't that quite hard?
Specifically, it sounds rather like the problem of drawing text nicely at various resolutions. Consider TrueType, or Type 1 Postscript fonts. The basic character shape is defined by vectors, by Bezier curves. To render it prettily, so that, for example, all the vertical strokes on an 'm' are the same thickness regardless of how the letter falls onto the pixel grid, you need to add what Adobe call hints and Microsoft call grid-fitting.
Indeed, small objects such as text are a problem, as they either have to have a size that depends on the sub-pixel alignment or they will look bad. I'm not sure what the solution is here. It seems that for small-size objects we have to relax the device-independence a bit. I'm still confident this can be done, since others have done it before (DPS, NeWS, and nowadays MacOS X, I believe).
Are you intending this system to be usable only on high-res desktop machines? Or are you including hand-held devices, phones and wotnot, that have relatively slow CPUs and where 640x320 is ambitiously high resolution?
I'm not sure. It's definitely easier to do on high-res devices.
Of course, this requires a completely vector-graphics-based GUI, which is still the exception.
Maybe there's a reason for that. I'm not saying don't do it, but I'd recommend doing some experiments that prove it's actually possible before investing too much.
Definitely, there are reasons. But as with the Y2K bug, it is mostly a question of how long into the future you plan. Imagine new > 200 dpi devices being ready for production but not usable as no GUIs are available that can deal with that high a resolution. Regards, Stefan