Re: [lmi] [PATCH] Don't hard code explicit wxDatePickerCtrl size

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2015 18:04:41 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> I would also like to keep the tabbed dialogs small enough to fit on the
GC> screen at 800x600 resolution.

 They will fit if they can, but not making them too small for their
contents is not really the solution, especially as it affects all screen
sizes and not just such small ones.

GC> I think the mailing list stripped your attachments; could you please resend
GC> them directly to my personal account?

 Oops, I didn't know the mailing list didn't allow even images to be
posted, resent directly now.

GC> This is intriguing, and I'm trying to see it for myself with msw-xp. In
GC> "Display Properties", I select the "Appearance" tab and change "Font Size"
GC> from "Normal" to "Large". This affects only the title bar of lmi's tabbed
GC> dialog, but not the controls.
GC> 
GC> If I go the the "Settings" tab and click the "Advanced" pushbutton, I have
GC> the default "Normal size (96 DPI)" selected. I can change that to
GC> "Large size (120 DPI)"; is that the setting you have in mind?

 Yes. It seems that I misremembered how this worked, the DPI must have been
dependent on the "Font Size" choice in even more ancient MSW versions,
under XP you indeed need to change it there.

GC> >  Sure. But you can't say this to the users who don't have eagle perfect
GC> > eyesight to use the notebooks with native 3840*2160 pixels resolution
GC> > without scaling.
GC> 
GC> Okay. I guess I'm not working with the latest technology.

 It is still much less common than I'd like (it's ridiculous that 20''
displays with less pixels than 4'' smartphones are still being sold and
that you can still have trouble finding better than 1366*768 resolution in
a notebook), but we're slowly but surely getting there.

GC> This is very interesting to me because some years ago I tried larger
GC> fonts and found them unworkable--IIRC, especially for web browsing, the
GC> glyphs became larger, but their spacing wasn't adjusted. Clearly something
GC> has changed. Perhaps browsers have improved, or maybe I had made an
GC> infelicitous choice between msw-xp's two font-size options. I might find
GC> this very useful, personally.

 I must admit your case was the first one I thought about. Using DPI
scaling is a much better way of dealing with the problem than changing the
display resolution (when the latter is even possible) and while things are
still not perfect yet, they did improve a lot and continue to do so. Linux
should be pretty good at high DPI support nowadays and so is MSW 7+ (XP had
plenty of problems with it though). As much as it pains me to say it, the
OS that got this best, and by far, is Mac OS X though.

 Of course, there are still a lot of _programs_ that don't support high DPI
screens correctly and hard coding values in pixels is probably the most
common bug to blame for this (the next one being the absence of high
resolution icons and other artwork versions). And I'd just like to remove
lmi from their list...

 Regards,
VZ