Re: [Devel] TrueType font-scaling

[Vincent Caron]

On Sat, 2002-08-03 at 14:02, Ole André Vadla Ravnås wrote:
> 
> Ah, I see. Thanks! By the way -- another stupid question while I'm at it
> :)) Why are the same TrueType-fonts a lot bigger in my Linux environment
> than in Windows? Size 7 in Windows equals size 9 in my Linux environment
> it seems.

Most of the time font sizes are specified in points (a point is 1/72
inch or 0.035mm), not in pixels. It means that the resulting size in
pixels depends on your screen resolution. The screen resolution is
actually arbitralily set up by the OS. Windows let you choose the
resolution in the 'Display Properties/Settings' panel, 'Advanced'
button, where you select so-called 'big fonts', 'normal fonts' and so
on. You'll notice somehting that says 'Normal size (96 dpi)', which is
the default resolution of the screen under Windows. Try the 'other'
option, it brings up an interactive dialog that shows the relation
between font visual size and resolution.

It turns out that some Linux distro configure X with a 100dpi
resolution. This makes font slightly larger than the Windows ones for
the same point size. You can check your X resolution with 'xdpyinfo|grep
resolution'.

BTW, your two last sentences contradict each other :). It the last one
is true (7pt Windows = 9pt Linux), you are maybe running the other
popular XFree resolution which is 75dpi. Then you would say that for the
same point size, Linux fonts are much smaller than their Windows
counterpart.

Note that it is a very common pb for the web : too many people specify
absolute font sizes in points (the default HTML unit) when they actually
mean pixels, which leads to broken or illegible layouts on non-96dpi
platforms.