"Dan Kegel" dank@kegel.com wrote:
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 7:54 PM, L. Rahyen research@science.su wrote:
200 DPI limit is acceptable for most users. However, what this patch done by setting maximum to this small value (144) doesn't seems to be acceptable.
Users really are lost if they set a too-high value. They don't know how to do alt+mouse_move. Thus simply setting the limit higher again would be a support nightmare; we got a preview of that on wine-users recently, with user after user panicking.
But as I wrote in http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9715 we can probably do something that will make everybody happy: arrange for winecfg to never let the user set dpi so high that winecfg is bigger than the screen. That's probably pretty easy to do.
And we can probably make high-res users happier still by defaulting to Xft.dpi (used by Gnome and maybe KDE; it's set by default to 96, but is increased by some users of high-res displays).
IMO the Mozilla page you linked to in the bug is the correct approach. Users should set the DisplaySize setting in their X server configuration (if it isn't detected automatically). And applications should (by default) use the X server DPI calculated from that. Applications overriding the X server DPI are bad when you start to run them remotely.
If users want a graphical way of setting physical display size, then that's a job for the desktop environments to provide some tools to configure the local X server.
The only time Wine should have to worry about DPI is when running apps that haven't been designed with high DPI in mind and therefore don't scale well (for instance when font sizes are set in points and other GUI elements are sized or positioned using pixels). But for those apps it might be good enough to provide a simple checkbox that says "override DPI to 96" or some other sensible default value. I don't know if there actually are such apps.