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HiDPI

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Steven R. Baker

HiDPI

Heya folks,

I have a laptop with a 3K screen. Is it possible to tell Pharo to render
everything at a double resolution or something? I feel like this ought
to have been a solved problem already, sorry if it's really obvious and
I just haven't found it.

I use Debian if that matters; I suspect this just works out of the box
on Macs.

Cheers!

-Steven

Tim Mackinnon

Re: HiDPI

I raised a similar thing with a new MacBook Pro a few months ago - currently Pharo is blurry and I also find it quite jolting moving from apps like Chrome or IntelliJ to a slightly fuzzier Pharo.

Unfortunately - this isn’t an easy fix as it seems like the solution is tied to Bloc. I believe progress is moving forward with Bloc, but I’m keen to hear at Pharo days if there is some way to move higher res screen implications forward as well.

I know many current Pharo developers either have lower res screens, or have just got used to it (I’m not finding I’m getting used to it) - but more importantly it makes it very difficult for me to show new developers how cool Pharo is as they all comment that it looks funny compare to their other tools.

Of course, its open source, and we can all chip in - unfortunately this one seems like it needs quite specialised knowledge - but I think the desire is there.

Tim

> On 15 May 2017, at 17:52, Steven R. Baker <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Heya folks,
>
> I have a laptop with a 3K screen. Is it possible to tell Pharo to render
> everything at a double resolution or something? I feel like this ought
> to have been a solved problem already, sorry if it's really obvious and
> I just haven't found it.
>
> I use Debian if that matters; I suspect this just works out of the box
> on Macs.
>
> Cheers!
>
> -Steven
>
>

Steven R. Baker

Re: HiDPI

I would be happy to help, I just don't know where to get started.

-Steven

On 16/05/17 18:01, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

> I raised a similar thing with a new MacBook Pro a few months ago - currently Pharo is blurry and I also find it quite jolting moving from apps like Chrome or IntelliJ to a slightly fuzzier Pharo.
>
> Unfortunately - this isn’t an easy fix as it seems like the solution is tied to Bloc. I believe progress is moving forward with Bloc, but I’m keen to hear at Pharo days if there is some way to move higher res screen implications forward as well.
>
> I know many current Pharo developers either have lower res screens, or have just got used to it (I’m not finding I’m getting used to it) - but more importantly it makes it very difficult for me to show new developers how cool Pharo is as they all comment that it looks funny compare to their other tools.
>
> Of course, its open source, and we can all chip in - unfortunately this one seems like it needs quite specialised knowledge - but I think the desire is there.
>
> Tim
>
>> On 15 May 2017, at 17:52, Steven R. Baker <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Heya folks,
>>
>> I have a laptop with a 3K screen. Is it possible to tell Pharo to render
>> everything at a double resolution or something? I feel like this ought
>> to have been a solved problem already, sorry if it's really obvious and
>> I just haven't found it.
>>
>> I use Debian if that matters; I suspect this just works out of the box
>> on Macs.
>>
>> Cheers!
>>
>> -Steven
>>
>>
>

Stephan Eggermont-3

Re: HiDPI

In reply to this post by Steven R. Baker

Hi Tim, Steven

No, it has nothing to do with Bloc. The necessary change was made by Tobias in the squeak vm some time ago, but that was destabilizing the spur vm at that time. I assume it is time to revisit it now the gc bugs seem to be gone.

Stephan

Uko2

Re: HiDPI

But AFAIK what Tobias did was just to render per pixel essentially scaling all UI 4 times. While the VM should be able to render per pixel, there should be some abstraction that converts generic “points” if the normal UI to pixels used for rendering. So we can have the same UI as we had without doing any changes, but something should know that each point on the retina devices consists of 4 pixels, while on other devices it consists of 1 pixel. This was done at some iteration of Block, maybe it can be done in a different way.

Uko

P.S. yes, I know that you can increase the font to mitigate the scaled down UI, but everything else (icons, margins, …) will stay the same size. And this is the point of abstract points, to separate the concerns of UI modeling from rendering.

> On 17 May 2017, at 11:18, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi Tim, Steven
>
> No, it has nothing to do with Bloc. The necessary change was made by Tobias in the squeak vm some time ago, but that was destabilizing the spur vm at that time. I assume it is time to revisit it now the gc bugs seem to be gone.
>
> Stephan
>
>

philippeback

Re: HiDPI

Ah, the @x2 and @x3 fun...

https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/graphics/image-size-and-resolution/

On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 2:48 PM, Yuriy Tymchuk <[hidden email]> wrote:

But AFAIK what Tobias did was just to render per pixel essentially scaling all UI 4 times. While the VM should be able to render per pixel, there should be some abstraction that converts generic “points” if the normal UI to pixels used for rendering. So we can have the same UI as we had without doing any changes, but something should know that each point on the retina devices consists of 4 pixels, while on other devices it consists of 1 pixel. This was done at some iteration of Block, maybe it can be done in a different way.

Uko

P.S. yes, I know that you can increase the font to mitigate the scaled down UI, but everything else (icons, margins, …) will stay the same size. And this is the point of abstract points, to separate the concerns of UI modeling from rendering.

> On 17 May 2017, at 11:18, Stephan Eggermont <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi Tim, Steven
>
> No, it has nothing to do with Bloc. The necessary change was made by Tobias in the squeak vm some time ago, but that was destabilizing the spur vm at that time. I assume it is time to revisit it now the gc bugs seem to be gone.
>
> Stephan
>
>