Vista Resolution Independence

[mayest]

Ok, I've had Vista Business RTM (legit) for about a month. One of the features that I was really looking forward to is the resolution independent interface. I thought that this would mean that I could run my monitor at its full 1600x1200 resolution, but make everything the same size as it would be at, say, 1280x960. I was thinking that this would look better than actually running the display at the lower resolution.

Well, I easily figured out how to change the size of icons. That's nice. I also figured out that I could change the DPI of text in Vista (the identical process that is used in XP). Now, the built-in programs in Vista (IE7, Notepad, and such) seem to be very readable using fonts at 120 DPI. However, Firefox seems to ignore the setting entirely, and the text seems quite small (I can read it, but I'd prefer it to display text the same size as other things). I haven't yet installed anything else since I'm dual-booting with XP.

I guess that I thought that Vista would allow me to set a particular resolution, and then it would run the monitor at native resolution but "lie" to all of the programs and tell them to scale for some lower resolution. Apparently, I don't understand what this feature really means, other than that icons can be displayed nicely at various sizes. It seems that I shouldn't have to specify a higher font DPI, just tell Vista to "fake" 1280x960 or whatever.

Can somebody please explain this feature and where my understanding is wrong? I couldn't find a satisfactory answer in the Vista help file or by using Google.

 

[Piuc2020]

Resolution independence means UI elements are not defined by pixels but rather actual physical space, for example right now a extra large icon in Vista is 256x256, its resolution dependent and the icon will look smaller at a higher resolution and bigger at a lower resolution (there are less pixels on the screen but the icon still takes the same 256x256 pixels). Resolution Indepent UI elements do not scale with resolutions (they are thus resolution independent) because their size is defined by length units and not pixels (which have varying physical sizes) so for example the taskbar can be set to be half an inch tall and it will be half an inch tall across every resolution.

A good way to understand this would be 3D games, 3D games are perfect because the screen renders resolution indepent elements and resolution dependent elements at the same time. Put a game at 640x480, say a shooter, and then to 1280x1024, the size of the 3D renders are the exact same size, except at 1280 they look much crisper, this means the 3D renders' size is resolution independant. Now look at the HUD, at 640x480 it will look huge and at 1280x1024 it will look tiny, because these 2D elements ARE resolution dependant.

Thats what res independent means and I believe Vista does not have this feature.

 

[StopSign]

I think it's easier to think in terms of "percentage of the screen" than "physical space."

 

[mayest]

Thanks for the replies. I'm still a bit foggy on this. I thought that I had read somewhere (months or years ago) that, say, a 12-point font in Vista would actually be 12-points (1/6th of an inch) on the screen, no matter what resolution you were running. Piuc2020 seems to say that would be resolution independence, but that Vista doesn't support it. Is that correct?

I guess I'll just try running Vista at 1280x960, just like I do XP. That isn't native resolution, but it looks fine to me.

 

[mchammer]

They probably won't get all of this stuff ironed out for a long time.

 

[postmortemIA]

Firefox locks DPI on 96...nothing that you can do about it. (There was some setting in about:config but it seems to be broken)

use IE

 

[drag]

The DPI setting is Dots Per Inch. Effectively it's a way to tell your computer how big your display is per a resolution.

It's very important for LCD displays so that you can match the DPI with the the correct native pixel resolution of your monitor and get the best image.

So to find your correct DPI you find your exact width of the viewable display and then use that to divide up the number of pixels...

So say if your have a 17 inch display and the actual width of the display is 13 inches and your using 1280 resolution. So you take 1280/13 and that gives you a DPI of about 98.46.

In other words the higher the DPI the smaller your telling the OS the display is. With a correct DPI setup a inch on the screen (say in photoshop) will correspond to a inch in real life. (since everything would be adjusted for screen size and resolution)


Windows XP defaulted to 96 DPI as a good medium ground.

Apple's MacOS defaulted to 72.


So the new feature is that Vista can have the correct DPI (which isn't that special as other OSes have had that for years)



For having scaling graphics to were you can have everything dynamicly adjust to the correct sizes and such or get bigger or smaller as you feel like it would require vector-based graphics. I know they do this for the icons on the desktop, but I would expect that other UI elements are still all bitmapped since it has to be backward compatable with older Windows versions.

 

[drag]

Oh and since I have a CRT monitor it doesn't realy work out that way. The DPI of the native resolution should be aviable for most LCD displays in their manuals.

Or if you go online they often will have exact mm measurements of display sizes and such and you can use that also.

How I personally do it (although my DPI is correctly detected nowadays. If your does then this is not something that matters) is that I use 'The Gimp' program's built-in monitor calibration feature. With the toolbar if you go file --> preferences there is some options for calibrating monitor.

What it does is that it displays to bars, one horizontal and the other vertical for you to measure with a ruler. (I use a metal ruler that bends to the shape of the glass when I press it down) You input the size of the bars you measured and then it uses that to calculate the DPI. Then I use that result to configure my window system's DPI.

 

[mayest]

Thanks drag, that makes a lot of sense. I think that my gripe is that fonts are not vector graphics so they don't scale the way that I wish they would. I read somewhere that the reason the whole OS isn't "vectorized" is that it would be too complex to render everything in a reasonable amount of time (i.e., instantaneously).

 

[CTho9305]

Fonts should scale just fine, but IIRC apps have to mark themselves as resolution-independence-aware. Firefox probably doesn't do that.

Firefox asks the system for the current DPI and uses that; on Windows, prefs can't override this behavior. If you want Firefox to act like the DPI is some value, you have to set Windows to that DPI.

 

[mayest]

CTho9305, that's the thing. Firefox seems to do its own thing. I already set the Vista DPI to 120 and it is readable, but Firefox looks to be stuck at 96 DPI. I had the same problem in XP with Firefox, which is why I just gave up and used a lower resolution.

 

[CTho9305]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355179
It looks like DPI settings should be working as of Firefox 2.0.0.1.