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Quick resolution question..

Morpheus
By Morpheus
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Because text is assigned certain number of pixels. Most characters are 1 pixel thick, therefore as the pixels get smaller, the smaller the character appears

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why can't the developers of windows just make it scale with resolution?

because it would make text look funny, although thr are options within windows to make text larger

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You can't really expect to have text a certain size on a 21" 1600x900 monitor, and when you upgrade to a 21" 1080p monitor, that since the pixels are more tightly packed, the text will scale to a larger size to compensate.  The computer has no idea whether the pixels are more tightly packed or not. What happens if you upgraded to a 27" 1080p monitor instead?  The resolution is still the same, how does it know whether or not to scale up, and by how much?  If you wanted the text to scale up in order to remain a certain size relative to real-world measurements, regardless of pixel density, then the computer would need to know how many pixels are in 1cm, which is a factor of both resolution and physical size, not just resolution alone.

 

This can be done more easily on mobile devices and mobile operating systems because they are more modern and can be designed to deal with it, and the amount of proprietary-ness means things don't have to be adopted as a mass standard to be put into use.  But PC operating systems and protocols are much older and use well established standards for display interfaces and how they communicate, so there is no mechanism to handle this issue seamlessly on the desktop as of yet and it's not a quick process to get the additional information implemented into a large display standard so that operating systems can read the information from any monitor and adjust accordingly.

 

Of course, it wouldn't take much effort for Microsoft to add in a little box on the display setup page where you type in how many inches your monitor is (this would solve alignment issues with mis-matched multi-monitor setups too) but I guess they have bigger things to worry about.

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You can't really expect to have text a certain size on a 21" 1600x900 monitor, and when you upgrade to a 21" 1080p monitor, that since the pixels are more tightly packed, the text will scale to a larger size to compensate.  The computer has no idea whether the pixels are more tightly packed or not. What happens if you upgraded to a 27" 1080p monitor instead?  The resolution is still the same, how does it know whether or not to scale up, and by how much?  If you wanted the text to scale up in order to remain a certain size in real-world measurements, regardless of pixel density, then the computer would need to know how many pixels are in 1cm, which is a factor of both resolution and physical size, not just resolution alone.

 

This can be done more easily on mobile devices and mobile operating systems because they are more modern and can be designed to deal with it, but PC operating systems and protocols are much older, so there is no mechanism to handle this issue seamlessly on the desktop as of yet.

thanks, much more clear now :)

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