Re: [boost] GUI coordinate units (Was: GUI foundations)

In-Reply-To: <4342E0EF.4050601@sympatico.ca> seefeld@sympatico.ca (Stefan Seefeld) wrote (abridged):
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.
Surely it's more a question of how far into the past you support?
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.
I'm kind-of asking why we will succeed when other people have failed. It sounds like the answer is "anti-aliasing". The GUI will only support devices that have enough colours to do good anti-aliased rending. OK; that may be a reasonable answer. Most modern devices seem to have lots of colours even when they don't have lots of pixels. For example, my phone has only 208x320 pixels but 16 bits of colour. -- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK.

Dave Harris wrote:
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.
I'm kind-of asking why we will succeed when other people have failed.
It sounds like the answer is "anti-aliasing". The GUI will only support devices that have enough colours to do good anti-aliased rending.
Either you have high resolution, in which case you don't need anti-aliasing, or you don't, in which case anti-aliasing will make small text unreadably blury. It seems there is nothing you can do to avoid hinting, meaning at that small a scale you have to account for device coordinates quite carefully. Regards, Stefan

Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca> writes:
Either you have high resolution, in which case you don't need anti-aliasing, or you don't, in which case anti-aliasing will make small text unreadably blury.
FWIW, with cleartype antialiasing enabled on my Windows laptop, small text is much clearer than it otherwise would be. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com
participants (3)
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brangdon@cix.compulink.co.uk
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David Abrahams
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Stefan Seefeld