Pyra: How to provide readable fonts?


klapse

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Hi,

the Pyra will feature a 5" 1080p screen. This will make all standard linux software (including the debian-arm stuff) have far too small fonts to be readable.

Question: How will the Pyra community ensure that software will have readable (extra large fonts)?

Will software packages need to be modified, or can the Pyra OS be made to change default font sizes for standard packages?

I am thinking of XFCE menus, Terminal emulators, standard GTK app dialogs etc.

Will we need to provide overrides for debian-arm packages, or would PNDs for Terminal emulator, XFCE etc be a better way?

The stock software needs to be readable on a 1080p 5" screen...
 
I know if we don't have a hardware scalar working on whatever SoC we end up with I will need to code up a 5x or 6x scaler for OpenTyrian as 4x doesn't quite make it full screen.
 
I think KDE/Qt is based (almost) entirely on vector graphics...
 
Yes, but Pyra debs or PNDs will need to be modified to use larger fonts. This is a lot of work we need to be prepared for.
 
No.

Anything using GTK will use the GTK theme for icon size and font size.

If you use Qt, most programs will respect the settings youuse there.
 
Font sizes are not really an issue, standard GUI libraries like GTK and Qt make it easy to globally scale fonts up in all dialogs and menus etc. Icon / toolbar sizes are a bigger issue -- lots of interfaces use bitmaps for that (e.g. 32x32 or even smaller), and those would be really tiny on a full HD 5" screen.

I think the best approach is to set the screen to 960x540 by default like slaeshjag proposes. That still results in slightly higher dpi than the Pandora, but not too much to be problematic. And since the pixels are nicely doubled, there are no scaling artifacts at all (such artifacts can be really annoying for desktop applications).

Games and emulators would typically use the hardware scaler, like on the Pandora. If your game uses 320x240 or 640x480 or 800x480, just set the screen to that resolution and let the hardware scaler do the rest. So no problem there.
 
qt, gtk and efl read the dpi the screen report and adapt the rendering based on it nowadays. So text should be readable from day one without any configuration...

Else we'll need to find the problem and bug report it.

Beside, as font size's all configurable :)
 
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