Re: Misc. comments

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

From: Alexander Malmberg <alexander@malmberg.org> wrote:
> - I work quite a lot with 3d-rendering and modelling, so I often use
> ridiculously high resolutions. Thus, the GUI really must be resolution
> independent (resolution as in dpi). How is this supposed to be handled
> in GNUstep? Is the backend supposed to rescale everything transparently
> (so dimensions given in a program are really 1/72's of an inch, not
> pixels), or are the widgets supposed to take font sizes into account
> when calculating their sizes?

This is a  problem related to the subjacent  drawing architecture, and
to the way the pictures/icons are defined and drawn.

On NeXTSTEP,  with a display of 96  dpi, some scaling was  done by DPS
when a  window was specified  to contain 72dps picture.  Actually, DPS
being so good  at isolate the device resolution  from the application,
it was really easy for application to add zooming functions.

However,  the small  pictures such  as scroll  bar buttons,  or window
title buttons were defined as  bitmaps, and would not be zoomed nicely
when changing the resolution.

This  is a  problem that  will become  even more  important  as 200dpi
screens begin to appear.

NSImage is able  to handle pictures defined in  several ways. We could
store  thes small pictures  and icons,  in NSImages  with a  couple of
bitmap  representation  with different  resolutions,  and a  vectorial
representation of  higher resolutions. The  problem is to  define them
and store them in our resource files.

Also, with the  current scheme where it's the  window manager who does
the drawing of  the window adornments, part of  the problem belongs to
the window  manager too. With WindowMaker,  we can change  the size of
the icons in  WPrefs.app. However, it seems that  it's not possible to
change the  font/fontsize used for window titles  and WindowMaker menu
(at least, I can't find it in WPrefs).

Right now,  the application can  quite easily "zoom" the  GUI elements
inside its windows. It would be better if it was handled by the AppKit
for all the applications, by default.


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