Pavel's ChangeLog week of 2018-01-29

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Pavel's ChangeLog week of 2018-01-29

Pavel Krivanek-3
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

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Re: Pavel's ChangeLog week of 2018-01-29

Pavel Krivanek-3
The mailing list server rejected the original message because of the
screenshots size. The next try to attach them

2018-02-05 10:18 GMT+01:00 Pavel Krivanek <[hidden email]>:

> 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

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