fonts in kate

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 at 18:01, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> Thanks for that! An excellent site that puts a lot of stuff in context,
> even the need to reboot. :-) The best single site I've seen for this
> topic. The Arch site seems to have a lot of good info, well presented.
> You've mentioned Arch before, with good results.  Maybe that should be
> my go-to site for problems...

The Arch Wiki is industry-leading and as such a great source of information.

This is not a dig, but if you work on improving your Google-fu, then
you will often find, as I do, that a well-crafted Google query will
offer the Arch wiki a sa

The thing that you must remember at all times is that while the Arch
wiki is superb at explaining what happens and why it happens and what
you can do, it is solely intended as a reference tool for Arch Linux.
Anything that it tells you about config files, or file locations, or
dependencies, or libraries, or whatever, may either not help you with
Ubuntu, may cause you to break your OS very badly, or may lead you up
a blind alley.

It may tell you to check a setting in a file, but that file does not
exist on Ubuntu – or does but is in a different location, or has a
different name, or both. Or Ubuntu might use an older version, and
that *might*  use different settings, so you will find the file, in
the state place, and with similar contents to what the Arch wiki says
-- and then if you change a line that the Arch Wiki recommends, you
will break your PC because Ubuntu doesn't understand that setting.

So yes, it's a great source of info, but a very poor and occasionally
actively dangerous source of guidance or suggestions for a totally
different distro.

If you have expert-level knowledge, then it's possible to read it,
understand the problem, mentally translate the instructions into those
for the distro you're working on, and use the answer. But unless
you're very confident indeed, *and* know *both* Arch and your desired
distro inside-out, and know the differences, and know how to
translate, then DO NOT TRY TO FOLLOW SPECIFIC CHANGE INSTRUCTIONS
RECOMMENDED BY THE ARCH WIKI.

So, as I said, use it as general troubleshooting advice. Use it to
find keywords to improve your Google query.

If you googled for

x.org kde 5.21 dpi setting ubuntu

... and you got a link to the Arch wiki, then you know that that query
was not specific enough, and you might need, say,

x.org kde 5.21 dpi setting "ubuntu" -arch

> As I'm finding out. :-( Looks like both system and app tweaks may be
> necessary. This may be how Apple makes it "just work". I naively
> thought I'd just get a better monitor and everything would look better.

There are 2 issues.

[1] Apps scaling to match the DPI setting
[2] Apps obeying *fractional* DPI settings

E.g. right now I'm looking at my iMac's  5,120-by-2,880 display.

I am also trying to install Alpine Linux in a VirtualBox VM. The
default window size for the VM is 640*480, which looks a bit like a
postage stamp on this 27" screen.

If I scale it to 200% it's easy. VBox displays 2 pixels for every
pixel on the virtual screen. Multiplying by 2 is trivially easy and so
very fast for a computer (and in principle you should immediately know
*why* this is. If you don't, then you will for similar reasons
probably not be able to spot why some advice on the Arch wiki will be
dangerous to Ubuntu users).

I could also scale it by 3. That makes it a bigger size still, but is
slower. It may not be obvious why but if you think about why doubling
is easy, you will understand.

But if I scale it by 125% or 275% (also options), then some things
will get jagged and ugly. This is because in places it can display 2
pixels but in other only 1, and so the scaling won't be consistent and
things will change shape.

When KDE doubles the pixels on screen,  it's easy. Things get bigger
in a uniform way but they look more jagged. If it scales it by 1.5
instead of by 2, though, it's much harder work. All apps need to know
that when they display a triangle, they can't display a bitmap that is
200 pixels across at the base and 198 pixels the line about and 196 on
the line above that. They need to send commands saying draw a line
from position #1 to this position #2, then to position #3, then to
fill the resulting shape with colour 0x34fcab.

This is a very different set of operations and apps have to be
specifically written to work this way. Old ones won't be because for
decades all screens were 72dpi, that's it, the end. So you could plonk
pixels and bitmaps on the screen and they'd look right. Not any more.
And a lot of apps need to do a lot of work before this will work as
expected.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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