Pavel's ChangeLog week of 2018-01-29

> Hi,
>
> on my laptop, I have a 13.3" display with resolution 3200x1800. The
> value of PPI of this display is 276 and because I'm using Linux that
> does not provide a simple way how to scale the resolution of a window
> that does not provide high PPI out of the box, it makes Pharo with the
> default settings usable on that machine only with a magnifier. I need
> to say that Pharo is not alone, a huge amount of application has real
> troubles with high values of PPI on Linux.
>
> Pharo provides a possibility to increase the size of the fonts which
> makes system more usable but it has a lot of issues. The icons,
> scrollbars and other elements keep the original size so they are
> really tiny. The grips for windows resizing too which makes them hard
> to catch. The default size of the windows is not changed as well so
> you need to resize literally every window by hand.
>
> This is not only an issue of high PPI displays. When you do a
> presentation on projectors, in most cases you need to make text
> bigger.
>
> Unfortunately, in current Morphic it is not imaginable that we will
> solve this issue properly on the level of canvases. The rendering of
> the Morphic with Athens is a better way but nor ready and no-one will
> spend energy on it with the planned switch to Bloc that will finally
> solve this issue properly.
>
> But because I needed some solution, I decided to introduce a
> worldScaleFactor that provides a simple constant that that will scale
> the UI elements and then started to use it in all places where it is
> needed. It is a dirty solution but starts to work quite well.
>
>
>
> You can scale the UI down too. From the screenshot, you can see that
> some places still need to be improved.
>
>
>
> The next issue whit high PPI on Linux VM is with the cursor's size. It
> cannot be replaced by bigger ones that the package VistaCursors
> provides because the primitive for the cursor replacing fails. But
> fortunately it has a simple solution, the VM needs to be linked with
> Xrender library, see
> https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/12960/Primitive-101-Cursor-beCursor-fails-on-Ubuntu
>
> Cheers,
> -- Pavel