History of Display Configuration

One of the ongoing problems I have been having is with the font and icon sizes in some applications. In the good old days one could configure each monitor individually, but the current setup which I think is handled under the X11 driver interface is that while we can select the different screen sizes and move them to match the physical layout, the 'size' function is applied globally. Another little niggle is the way things keep switching around when a monitor becomes unavailable. My long term setup previously was a set of three 27" HD monitors with a fourth slightly smaller HD TV which had it's own DVD player. The monitor still sits here to the right but the 27" monitors have been replaced by a 32" 4K monitor in the middle and a 19" HD monitor to the right. The smaller monitor is useful when debugging web page layouts, but I will add a second 4K monitor when I can afford it (the tax man owes me money from last year!). At that point I will probably retain the 19" one simply because it is useful at times, and mounting it over a second 32" one is no problem for X11.

One of the ongoing problems I have been having is with the font and icon sizes in some applications. In the good old days one could configure each monitor individually, but the current setup which I think is handled under the X11 driver interface is that while we can select the different screen sizes and move them to match the physical layout, the 'size' function is applied globally. Another little niggle is the way things keep switching around when a monitor becomes unavailable. My long term setup previously was a set of three 27" HD monitors with a fourth slightly smaller HD TV which had it's own DVD player. The monitor still sits here to the right but the 27" monitors have been replaced by a 32" 4K monitor in the middle and I have now replaced the 19" HD monitor to the left a second 4K reconditioned monitor to keep the cost down. In addition I have currently disabled the right hand TV so that the desktop is now a clean 7680 by 2160 although I did have to take the jigsaw to the desk to allow the two displays to be side by side. Something that was not a problem with the 19" one. The one remaining niggle is that the windows machine is struggling with the high resolution of the monitor and while it works fine at 1920 by 1080, when switching to higher resolutions that the display card supports, the vertical scaling goes wrong. It does not support 4k so while I can move the start bar to the top and use the 2560x1600 maximum, the times I use the windows desktop are such that 1920x1080 is not a problem. At least the keyboard switch still works and changes between computers.

Currently I have the display global scaling set to 150% and the fonts DPI set to 192 which is a good compromise between the different monitors although some elements can be fun to read. The main problem here is the restriction of some icons to a 16 pixel format. While the lemming solution has been to migrate to .svg font based icons, these have also followed the 'two colour' standard loosing the full colour versions. SVG can support full colour and so I do not see any problem in providing a scalable solution but I've not found an open source solution via that path, so the half way house of using a 32 pixel icon set looks like my best path currently for the bitweaver framework. This does not help with those icons being used in other applications!

Currently I have the display global scaling set to 125% and the fonts DPI set to 144 which is sort of working for most things. The main problem here is still the restriction of some icons to a 16 pixel format. While the lemming solution has been to migrate to .svg font based icons, these have also followed the 'two colour' standard loosing the full colour versions. SVG can support full colour and so I do not see any problem in providing a scalable solution but I've not found an open source solution via that path, so the half way house of using a 32 pixel icon set looks like my best path currently for the Bitweaver framework. This does not help with those icons being used in other applications!

Having now got the basic framework under control, the ((Application UI scaling|next problem IS application specific)), such as the new Firefox left hand functions bar on which we are back to small icons and I get a similar problem in Thunderbird so both must be using a similar theming interface? PDF Arranger is another useful application which is unusable from the tool bars and one has to resort to the drop down menus to find a function.

Having now got the basic framework under control, the ((Application UI scaling|next problem IS application specific)), such as the new Firefox left hand functions bar on which we are back to small icons and I get a similar problem in Thunderbird so both must be using a similar theming interface? PDF Arranger is another useful application which is unusable from the tool bars and one has to resort to the drop down menus to find a function, and changing the font sizes on Flamerobin is most definitely now a problem that needs some work. While it was usable on the left hand screen, it no longer is.

New Developments

With the addition of a separate graphics card, the drivers need updating to support an nvidia chip set. SDB:NVIDIA drivers