Re: [XForms] fdesign DPI aware

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

Hi Joel,

   sorry for letting you wait that long for an answer,
but I was drowning in other work and had no resources
left to take care of it.

On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 08:33:08PM -0600, Joel wrote:
> I used to use xforms many years ago. I recently found that it is
> still available and loaded it on my Debian system. I am having an
> issue with usability of fdesign. I am using 4K monitors and fdesign
> does not seem to be DPI aware nor have controls to set the GUI size.
> It makes the control window too small for my tired eyes. So the
> questions are,
> 
> Is there a way to make the control window larger? I looked at the
> fdesign start-up options and did not see anything.

To be honest, I'm not sure. There's an option to fdesign,
'-unit', which can be used to specify the unit used in
fdesign. Supported are

    pixel
    mm
    point
    cp     (centi-point, i.e. tenth of a point)
        cmm    (centi-millimeter, i.e. tenth of a millimeter)

But I must admit that I've never tried it and thus don't know
it it works properly - never heard from someone usung it. And,
actually, when I just tried and it it ended in a segmentation
fault:-( But rather likely that's the way to go once that has
been fixed.

> Is xforms still actively being developed? Can you make it DPI aware
> or customizable?

At the moment I'm too busy to do much about XForms (and there's
no-one else that has volunteered to take over). And while it
might be possible to use some different units for fdesign be-
side pixels, internally everything is done in pixels exclus-
sively. If your program doesn't change any sizes of objects
 etc. it might be good enough, otherwise your program needs
to be DPI-aware...

You must understand that XForms comes from a time when normal
screens had 75 dpi and more expensive ones 100 dpi - and be-
yond that nothing existed (unless you had a real, real, lot
of money to spend for a monitor and graphics hardware;-).
And there was no Unicode, nor fancy anti-aliased TTF fonts etc.
I've started to try to introduce some of this, but mostly as a
single developer who works on it in his spare time progress
is rather limited, sorry.
                            Best regards, Jens
-- 
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