History of Display Configuration
<p>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 The monitor still sits here to the right but the 27" monitors have been replaced by a 32" 4K monitor in the middle and a 19" HD monitor to the right.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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>So the next step has been to sort out a 'plasma theme' that gives me the best general layout. I have been playing with the dark themes, but I am happier with the light ones so my current subset are based on that. That there are perhaps hundreds of themes on the various download sites does not help when trying to sort out, so I have been keeping closer to the more generally available ones. It would be helpful if there was an information page like summary of just what has been selected, having to cycle through a dozen settings pages are a pain. I've wiped all the downloaded themes and am back with the default Breeze and openSUSE sets so I have a clean canvas. Having spotted that the main version of each respects the colour selection options I have a nice base setup.</p>
<p>Application style is a little easier to sort since I prefer to see the scroll bars which Fusion displays nicely, although MS Windows 9x would match my current backup windows machine setup. Windows decoration being managed separately just adds to the fun, and not being able to strip the unwanted styles like one can in the other selections is just annoying. That many of the available styles do not have decent function icons is now obvious on the selection screen, and Plastik has a much better contrast and icon size to all the current options although Breeze sizes are also practical. Need to clear out the ones I don't need, and I now know that it's that area that I perhaps need to look at creating my own custom style.</p>
<p>At least both Icons and Cursors setup screen allows the removal of entries and I've wiped both and returned to Breeze although the light version of the Cursors allows better viability of the text cursor especially when using at 54pixel size. It would just be nice if the notification icons had full colour options, perhaps another target for a custom option which will tie in with what I am looking at for the bitweaver web service framework.</p>
<p>Having now got the basic framework under control, the 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.</p>
<p>Another niggle on the desktop is that right click pop-ups can be flaky. They don't always appear, just flashing up and disappearing again. In addition they do often pop up as just a black box and I have to close and reopen. There has been comments about changing the mouse, but I've tried three now with the same results, so I consider it is a functionality problem, but just what part of the driver chain is responsible?</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>So the next step has been to sort out a 'plasma theme' that gives me the best general layout. I have been playing with the dark themes, but I am happier with the light ones so my current subset are based on that. That there are perhaps hundreds of themes on the various download sites does not help when trying to sort out, so I have been keeping closer to the more generally available ones. It would be helpful if there was an information page like summary of just what has been selected, having to cycle through a dozen settings pages are a pain. I've wiped all the downloaded themes and am back with the default Breeze and openSUSE sets so I have a clean canvas. Having spotted that the main version of each respects the colour selection options I have a nice base setup.</p>
<p>Application style is a little easier to sort since I prefer to see the scroll bars which Fusion displays nicely, although MS Windows 9x would match my current backup windows machine setup. Windows decoration being managed separately just adds to the fun, and not being able to strip the unwanted styles like one can in the other selections is just annoying. That many of the available styles do not have decent function icons is now obvious on the selection screen, and Plastik has a much better contrast and icon size to all the current options although Breeze sizes are also practical. Need to clear out the ones I don't need, and I now know that it's that area that I perhaps need to look at creating my own custom style.</p>
<p>At least both Icons and Cursors setup screen allows the removal of entries and I've wiped both and returned to Breeze although the light version of the Cursors allows better viability of the text cursor especially when using at 54pixel size. It would just be nice if the notification icons had full colour options, perhaps another target for a custom option which will tie in with what I am looking at for the bitweaver web service framework.</p>
<p>Having now got the basic framework under control, the 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.</p>
<p>Another niggle on the desktop is that right click pop-ups can be flaky. They don't always appear, just flashing up and disappearing again. In addition they do often pop up as just a black box and I have to close and reopen. There has been comments about changing the mouse, but I've tried three now with the same results, so I consider it is a functionality problem, but just what part of the driver chain is responsible?</p>