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Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors?

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On 2025-12-26, John-Paul Stewart <jpstewart@personalprojects.net> wrote:
> On 2025-12-24 11:15 p.m., Robert Riches wrote:
>> 
>> Does anyone have favorite tutorials or other helps for dealing
>> with a high-DPI transition?
>> 
>> I'm Running Devuan (currently Daedalus, hopefully soon Excalibur)
>> using plain X and fvwm2, no DE as such with 1920x1200 monitors.
>> Just purchased a round of 4k monitors, so I'll be needing to
>> adjust xterm fonts, web browser issues, other GUI application
>> issues, etc.
>
> It's been a couple years since made a similar switch.  But as far as I
> recall, there's not much to do other than configuring X.  I had to
> manually specify the monitors' physical size (in millimetres) in my
> xorg.conf so that X could calculate the correct DPI.  Then everything
> that's measured in points just kind of fell into place.  (E.g., there
> was nothing to be done for LibreOffice, etc.)

And, it appears running 'xdpyinfo | grep resolution' should tell
me whether X automagically caught the resolution in case that's
already taken care of.

> You'll need to switch your window manager to a high-DPI theme (easy with
> my choice, xfwm4) since that's all laid out in pixels and you'll have
> tiny icons and title bars if you don't change.

Good points.  I don't intentionally use icons, and when I
accidentally iconify something it doesn't much matter what size
it is, because all I'm going to do is deiconify it.  Title bars
might be taken care of by the xterm*TitleFont and similar, so
I'll test that.

Finding a new fixed-width font could be an adventure.  I have
been using '9x15' for pretty much everything, but scaling says
I'll need approximately 15 or 16 by about 26, and I don't think
there is a canned one of that size.  Trying to use xfontsel has
always been about as much fun as battling a hydra.

> There were very few apps that required any tweaking once X and the
> window manager were correctly configured.  The venerable 'gv' is the
> only one I can think of that required its own DPI setting (in
> ~/.Xresources) rather than using X's own.

Thanks for the tip about gv.

>> For web browser issues, I anticipate a lot of fun with websites
>> and web apps that use (n)px directives for some of their margins
>> and spacing.  If the browser interprets those at face value,
>> mixed with other directives in units of text elements and such,
>> things could end up looking somewhat different from how the
>> developers intended.
> That's actually not an issue.  HTML/CSS "px" are NOT device pixels but
> units of 1/96 inches.[1]  In other words, HTML/CSS "px" are standardized
> at 96 DPI regardless of actual screen resolution.  So if something
> specifies 24px it actually means 1/4 inch.  On my 4K displays that ends
> up being more like 40 device pixels.  So websites will still work more
> or less as expected.
>
> [1] https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_units.asp

SWEET!  Thanks for explaining that HTML/CSS "px" are their own
thing, independent of device pixels!  Link bookmarked and your
post printed (so I can see it even if the screen is unreadable at
some point during the journey).

Thank you!

-- 
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

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[On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2025-12-25 04:15 +0000
  Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2025-12-25 11:45 +0000
    Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2025-12-26 02:03 +0000
  Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? John-Paul Stewart <jpstewart@personalprojects.net> - 2025-12-25 21:38 -0500
    Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2025-12-26 03:55 +0000
      Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? John-Paul Stewart <jpstewart@personalprojects.net> - 2025-12-26 11:10 -0500
        Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2025-12-31 05:00 +0000
    Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2025-12-26 00:03 -0500
    Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2026-01-15 05:09 +0000
      Xorg drivers overriding display resolution (was: Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors?) Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-01-15 11:20 +0000
    Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2026-01-21 22:54 +0000
      Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-01-22 10:09 +0000
        Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? John-Paul Stewart <jpstewart@personalprojects.net> - 2026-01-22 09:34 -0500
          Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2026-01-23 04:23 +0000
  Re: [On-Topic] any favorite tutorials or other helps for high-DPI monitors? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2025-12-26 00:00 -0500

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