Re: Interactive terminals : behaviour on window resizing

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Sunday 26 March 2006 01:22 pm, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> So let's narrow the discussion to the wxt terminal which know how to
> rescale fonts thanks to pango (however I don't know how it copes with
> non-scalable fonts... are they absolutely non-scalable ? ).

Bitmapped fonts are absolutely non-scalable.
This is an issue for x11/png(gd)/pbm, but I don't know if it=20
arises for pango.

> >>   1) really scale everything - including the font size
> >
> > This would be very odd in x11.  I cannot think of a single x11 applicat=
ion
> > in which the font size changes as you resize the window.  Generally you
> > pick a readable font size, and that's the size you get no matter how big
> > or small the window is.
>=20
> That's a good point.
> But notice that, apart from the gnuplot, I can't even think of any X11
> application which scale anything when the user resizes the window. Image
> viewers (gv, gimp...), web browsers (firefox...), pdf viewers (kpdf,
> acrobat reader...), etc. usually don't rescale anything, but behave like
> the point 2 that I describe below.

Huh?  In my experience image viewers (ImageMagick, qiv) and PDF
viewers (acroread)  *do* scale the image with the window size.
At least they do if you set that as the default behaviour, which I
generally do.  The setting is usually called something like
"fit to window".  Although now that you have me thinking of specific
applications, it is true that the text-reading apps like Acroread
or kpdf do scale the font as well.  That makes sense for pure text
documents, but I don't see why it would make sense for graphics.

Perhaps my expectations are colored by the field I work in.
The molecular graphics viewers which are used routinely in=20
my field scale objects up or down with the current window size,
but they do not scale the fonts.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742