screen physical size, DPI, font size - how does it work?

Marius Gedminas mgedmin at b4net.lt
Sun Oct 7 07:48:44 PDT 2007


On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 04:32:38PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Correct physical dpi use means the higher the pixel density the sharper
> the fonts. But font size itself does not change with density (like it
> does not change when you move from a 600dpi to a 1200dpi printer)

It may be more accurate to say that the physical font size (in inches or
milimeters) does not change with density.  The font size in pixels
changes, and people often notice that, because at low resolutions (e.g.
going from 75 dpi to 100 dpi) the letter shapes become noticeably
different.

> However when you lie to your libraries about dpi you have a zooming
> effect. So since your dpi value was misconfigured before, fonts had not
> their real size. Now it's fixed the size changed to the real value, but
> you have to fix the font settings you chose before based on the false
> font sizes your previous misconfiguration generated.

Right.  This will fix the size problems.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
You can't spell evil without vi.
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