Bug 93794

Summary:	No support for system-wide DPI scaling
Product:	Wayland	Reporter:	Yan Pas <yanp.bugz>
Component:	wayland	Assignee:	Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	yanp.bugz
Version:	1.5.0
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Yan Pas 2016-01-20 16:09:00 UTC

High! I was reading articale about linux downsides: 
http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
There were highlighted two Wayland minuses:
1) Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts antialiasing - there's no API for setting system wide fonts rendering. What??! Most sane and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac OS X. In Wayland all clients (read applications) are totally independent.
2) Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own DPI scaling.

It all sounds scary, is it possible for wayland to fix these issues? Should I open one new bug report for font-antialiasing?

Comment 1 Daniel Stone 2016-01-20 16:12:51 UTC

(In reply to Yan Pashkovsky from comment #0)
> 1) Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own fonts antialiasing -
> there's no API for setting system wide fonts rendering. What??! Most sane
> and advanced windowing systems work exactly this way - Windows, Android, Mac
> OS X. In Wayland all clients (read applications) are totally independent.

Yes. Font rendering is performed on the client side - as it is with X11 also - so Wayland has nothing to do with it. Realistically everyone uses the same method to render fonts, so this is not a problem.

> 2) Applications (GUI toolkits) must implement their own DPI scaling.

Yes. Toolkits are difficult to implement, so.

> It all sounds scary, is it possible for wayland to fix these issues? Should
> I open one new bug report for font-antialiasing?

No, these are not actually a part of Wayland, and generally are solved problems. If you want to use a new and exotic toolkit, then this will probably be difficult, but really, don't use new and exotic toolkits. You can bypass the system toolkits on Windows and OS X as well, to do all your own rendering and solve all these problems again yourself, but there's a reason people don't.

Solving these problems in Wayland would be akin to making Wayland a full toolkit itself, which is absolutely not what we want to do. If you have concerns about shortcomings in existing toolkits, please raise these with the toolkit developers.

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