Font Sizing Is Powerful

04/10/2023

Recently, we discovered a technique to achieve full DPI awareness on CSS-powered platforms. It passes our control of the root font size to the user agent--and you in turn--and basing all metrices on it instead of absolute units like pixel and point. This got both NET and Netronic to respect your font size preference down to their borders, much like adjusting the zoom level of a web page. Additionally, the root font size is also affected by DPI settings, effectively making this technique fully DPI aware.

For Netronic, said technique eliminates the need for DPI variants on its GTK themes. So, Revision 6 excludes them, which may break any high DPI setup. To migrate, do a clean install to remove those unneeded DPI variants, then select your preferred color variant with set a matching Xfwm4 theme disabled. For now, window manager (Xfwm4) themes are unaffected, but expect the same to happen in the future. We apologize for the inconvenience in return of its benefits.

For NET, said technique enables DPI awareness on our web applications and documents.

Unrelated to this post, this will be our last time working on four gigabytes of single-channel memory (RAM) at most after nearly 115 months. We finally gave in and decided to upgrade in hopes to enhance the usability of our aging Latitude 5480 without affecting our philosophies; eliminate memory concerns in our activities, not our products. CPU Turbo Boost remains locked and reserved for the last hurrah.