Re: widget size independant to screen resolution

On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 11:28:19AM +0100, Phil wrote:
> Paul Bonser wrote:
> >Am I wrong in these assumptions? Scaling a bitmap would be slow, yes,
> >but scaling fonts shouldn't be since they only need be scaled once, or
> >will be rendered with less detail, which would be faster...
> 
> If you only want it for terminals, that's fine.  However you asked for 
> it to be possible to shrink windows, and the majority of windows have 
> more than just text in them.
> 
> If you want to make a shrinking terminal, go for it; however, shrinking 
> of arbitrary windows is not going to happen.

Terminal emulators can be easily shrunk(sp?) by changing the font size.
If you have a vector canvas that is also cheaply resized. If you can't
do that, you're presumably doing bitmap massaging, which is easily
extended to `any window' as long as it is a bitmap representation, not
just to graphics viewers; those already do a lot of resizing anyway.
More to the point, resizing of $anything is useful if you want the
screen to have a 3d placement look.

I'm not saying this should be everywhere, always supported, but it'd be
a useful general extention, as well as move another not-entirely-cheap
operation out of applications and into the server, where presumably it
can be accelerated by suitable hardware (which may or may not exist yet).

So, in summary, I wouldn't dismiss the notion outright.


-- 
  j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .