Re: [Fontforge-devel] high resolution fonts

[<ms...@an...>]

On Sun, 16 Feb 2014, jon banquer wrote:
> > configuration and has nothing to do with FontForge.  What exactly is the
> > change you would like to see in FontForge?
>
>
> You are right, it's easy enough to hack around the problem. It just

My question wasn't rhetorical.  I'm not asserting there is no problem.
I'm asking:  what *is* the problem you propose to hack around?  That
has not been stated clearly, and it seems a shame to have a user going
off saying oh well, we weren't willing to fix the problem, when the
problem has not been defined.

> seemed like it would be more elegant to add another section to the
> bitmap-creation tools, where now they automate 75 dpi and 100 dpi
> settings, and add one for 200 dpi, since high-resolution displays are

By "the bitmap-creation tools" do you mean the "Bitmap Strikes Available"
dialogue box, where you can enter the size in pixels and it tells you how
many points that would be at 75 and 100dpi?  That's the only place I know
of where FontForge even mentions 75 and 100dpi.

If a change is made there, my suggestion would be that instead of adding
another box labelled 200dpi (and causing yet another of FontForge's
dialogue boxes to become too tall for my netbook computer's 600-pixel
vertical resolution), it would be better to remove the current 75 and 100
dpi boxes and instead have a box for "dpi" and a box for "point size."
Then you can enter whatever display pitch you want.  Doing that will
accomodate not only people with 75, 100, and 200dpi screens, but also
people with other screen pitches even less popular, and also people with
300, 600, 1200, and 2400dpi printers, as well as whatever wacky low-res
output devices users can come up with.  (Lego; counted cross-stitch
patterns; large-scale 3D printers; and so on.)  This is similar to what
GIMP does with image resolution in the new image and image
scaling/resizing dialogues.

In general, if we have a special convenience for three different display
pitches, in a world where actual display pitch is open-ended, we ought to
make it work for ALL display pitches.  In this case, that would actually
reduce the complexity of the UI, too.  Making a feature specifically
tailored to one unusual subset of users when it could be useful for
everybody inherently endorses those users as more valuable than others
and is not good design.  This is the same principle that guides my
comments on special support for the UFO file format in FontForge, and
special support for XCF-centric Photoshop-wannabe workflows in GIMP.

-- 
Matthew Skala
ms...@an...                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/