Resolution independence is where elements on a
computer screen
A computer monitor is an output device that displays information in pictorial or textual form. A discrete monitor comprises a visual display, support electronics, power supply, housing, electrical connectors, and external user controls.
The di ...
are rendered at sizes independent from the
pixel grid, resulting in a
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
that is displayed at a consistent physical size, regardless of the resolution of the screen.
Concept
As early as 1978, the typesetting system
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
due to
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...
introduced resolution independence into the world of computers. The intended view can be rendered beyond the atomic resolution without any artifacts, and the automatic typesetting decisions are guaranteed to be identical on any computer up to an error less than the diameter of an atom. This pioneering system has a corresponding
font
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mod ...
system,
Metafont, which provides suitable fonts of the same high standards of resolution independence.
The terminology
device independent file format
The device independent file format (DVI) is the output file format of the TeX typesetting program, designed by David R. Fuchs and implemented by Donald E. Knuth in 1982. Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not inte ...
(DVI) is the file format of Donald Knuth's pioneering
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
system. The content of such a file can be interpreted at any resolution without any artifacts, even at very high resolutions not currently in use.
Implementation
macOS
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
included some support for resolution independence in early versions of
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
, which could be demonstrated with the developer tool Quartz Debug that included a feature allowing the user to scale the interface. However, the feature was incomplete, as some icons did not show (such as in System Preferences), user interface elements were displayed at odd positions and certain bitmap
GUI
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
elements were not scaled smoothly. Because the scaling feature was never completed, macOS's user interface remained resolution-dependent.
On June 11, 2012, Apple introduced the 2012
MacBook Pro with a resolution of 2880×1800 or 5.2
megapixels
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...
– doubling the pixel density in both dimensions. The laptop shipped with a version of macOS that provided support to scale the user interface twice as big as it has previously been. This feature is called HighDPI mode in macOS and it uses a fixed scaling factor of 2 to increase the size of the user interface for high-DPI screens. Apple also introduced support for scaling the UI by rendering the user interface on higher or smaller resolution that the laptop's built-in native resolution and scaling the output to the laptop screen. One obvious downside of this approach is either a decreased performance on rendering the UI on a higher than native resolution or increased blurriness when rendering lower than native resolution. Thus, while the macOS's user interface can be scaled using this approach, the UI itself is not resolution-independent.
Microsoft Windows
The
GDI
GDI may refer to:
Science and technology
* Gasoline direct injection, a type of fuel injection
* Graphics Device Interface, a component of Microsoft Windows
* Guanosine nucleotide dissociation inhibitor, a protein
Organisations
* Gabriel Dumont I ...
system in Windows is pixel-based and thus not resolution-independent. To scale up the UI,
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
has supported specifying a custom
DPI
A Daytona Prototype International (DPi) was a type of sports prototype racing car developed specifically for the International Motor Sports Association's WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, as their top class of car, acting as a direct replaceme ...
from the Control Panel since
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
. (In
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0.
Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3 ...
, the DPI setting is tied to the screen resolution, depending on the driver information file.) When a custom system DPI is specified, the built-in UI in the operating system scales up. Windows also includes APIs for application developers to design applications that will scale properly.
GDI+
The Graphics Device Interface (GDI) is a legacy component of Microsoft Windows responsible for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers. Windows apps use Windows API to interact with G ...
in
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...
adds resolution-independent text rendering however, the UI in Windows versions up to
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...
is not completely high-DPI aware as displays with very high resolutions and high pixel densities were not available in that time frame.
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
and
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
scale better at higher DPIs.
Windows Vista also adds support for programs to declare themselves to the OS that they are high-DPI aware via a manifest file or using an API. For programs that do not declare themselves as DPI-aware, Windows Vista supports a compatibility feature called DPI virtualization so system metrics and UI elements are presented to applications as if they are running at 96 DPI and the
Desktop Window Manager
Desktop Window Manager (DWM, previously Desktop Compositing Engine or DCE) is the compositing window manager in Microsoft Windows since Windows Vista that enables the use of hardware acceleration to render the graphical user interface of Window ...
then scales the resulting application window to match the DPI setting. Windows Vista retains the Windows XP style scaling option which when enabled turns off DPI virtualization (blurry text) for all applications globally.
Windows Vista also introduces
Windows Presentation Foundation
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source graphical subsystem (similar to WinForms) originally developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initia ...
. WPF applications are vector-based, not pixel-based and are designed to be resolution-independent.
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
adds the ability to change the DPI by doing only a log off, not a full reboot and makes it a per-user setting. Additionally, Windows 7 reads the monitor DPI from the
EDID Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) and Enhanced EDID (E-EDID) are metadata formats for display devices to describe their capabilities to a video source (e.g. graphics card or set-top box). The data format is defined by a standard published ...
and automatically sets the DPI value to match the monitor's physical pixel density, unless the effective resolution is less than 1024 x 768.
In
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
, only the DPI scaling percentage is shown in the DPI changing dialog and the display of the raw DPI value has been removed.
[High DPI Settings in Windows](_blank)
/ref> In Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...
, the global setting to disable DPI virtualization (only use XP-style scaling) is removed. At pixel densities higher than 120 PPI (125%), DPI virtualization is enabled for all applications without a DPI aware flag (manifest) set inside the EXE. Windows 8.1 retains a per-application option to disable DPI virtualization of an app. Windows 8.1 also adds the ability for each display to use an independent DPI setting, although it calculates this automatically for each display. Windows 8.1 prevents a user from forcibly enabling DPI virtualization of an application. Therefore, if an application wrongly claims to be DPI-aware, it will look too small on high-DPI displays in 8.1, and a user cannot correct that.[ ]
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
adds manual control over DPI for individual monitors. In addition, Windows 10 version 1703 brings back the XP-style GDI scaling under a "System (Enhanced)" option. This option combines GDI+'s text rendering at a higher resolution with the usual scaling of other elements, so that text appears crisper than in the normal "System" virtualization mode.
Android
Since Android 1.6 "Donut" (September 2009) Android has provided support for multiple screen sizes and densities. Android expresses layout dimensions and position via the density-independent pixel or "dp" which is defined as one physical pixel on a 160 dpi screen. At runtime, the system transparently handles any scaling of the dp units, as necessary, based on the actual density of the screen in use.
To aid in the creation of underlying bitmaps, Android categorizes resources based on screen size and density:
X Window System
The Xft
Xft, the X FreeType interface library, is a free computer program library written by Keith Packard.
It uses the MIT/X license that The Open Group applied after the post X11R6.4 license restoration.
It is designed to allow the FreeType font ...
library, the font rendering library for the X11 system, has a dpi setting that defaults to 75. This is simply a wrapper around the FC_DPI system in fontconfig, but it suffices for scaling the text in Xft-based applications. The mechanism is also detected by desktop environments to set its own DPI, usually in conjunction with the EDID-based family of Xlib
Xlib (also known as libX11) is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the ...
functions. The latter has been rendered ineffective in Xorg Server 1.7; since then EDID information is only exposed to XRandR
X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.
Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve ...
.
In 2013, the GNOME
A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
desktop environment began efforts to bring resolution independence ("hi-DPI" support) for various parts of the graphics stack. Developer Alexander Larsson initially wrote about changes required in GTK+
GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...
, Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...
, Wayland and the GNOME themes. At the end of the BoF sessions at GUADEC
GUADEC, the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, is an annual developer conference, whose prime topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment and its underlying base software, such as GTK, GStreamer, etc.
The first GUADE ...
2013, GTK+ developer Matthias Clasen mentioned that hi-DPI support would be "pretty complete" in GTK 3.10 once work on Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...
would be completed. As of January 2014, hi-DPI support for Clutter
Clutter and its derivations may refer to any of the following:
Excessive physical disorder
* Clutter, a confusing, or disorderly, state or collection, and possible symptom of compulsive hoarding
* Clutter (marketing), numerous advertisements, a ...
and GNOME Shell
GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. ...
is ongoing work.
Gtk supports scaling all UI elements by integer factors, and all text by any non-negative real number factors. As of 2019, Fractional scaling of the UI by scaling up and then down is experimental.
Other
Although not related to true resolution independence, some other operating systems use GUI
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
s that are able to adapt to changed font sizes. Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
95 onwards used the Marlett
Marlett is a TrueType font that has been used in Microsoft Windows since Windows 95. The operating system uses this font to create user interface icons that are used in the menus and windows. TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating sy ...
font in order to scale some window controls (close, maximize, minimize, resize handles) to arbitrary sizes. AmigaOS
AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...
from version 2.04 (1991) was able to adapt its window controls to any font size.
Video games are often resolution-independent; an early example is '' Another World'' for DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
, which used polygons to draw its 2D content and was later remade using the same polygons at a much higher resolution. 3D games are resolution-independent since the perspective is calculated every frame and so it can vary its resolution.
See also
* Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...
* CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below). T ...
* Direct2D
Direct2D is a 2D vector graphics application programming interface (API) designed by Microsoft and implemented in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and also Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update i ...
* Display PostScript
Display PostScript (or DPS) is a 2D graphics engine system for computers which uses the PostScript (PS) imaging model and language (originally developed for computer printing) to generate on-screen graphics. To the basic PS system, DPS adds a num ...
* Himetric
* Inkscape
Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Other formats can be imported and exported.
Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes (e.g. rectang ...
* Page zooming
In computing, page zooming is the ability to zoom in and out a document or image at page level. It is usually found in applications related to document layout and publishing, e.g. word processing and spreadsheet programs, but it can also be found ...
* Responsive Web Design
* Retina display
* Scalable Vector Graphics
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sinc ...
* Synfig
Synfig Studio (also known as Synfig) is a free and open-source vector-based 2D animation software. It is created by Robert Quattlebaum with additional contributions by Adrian Bentley.
Synfig began as the custom animation platform for Voria Stu ...
* Twips
* Vector-based graphical user interface
* Vector graphics
Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display a ...
References
{{reflist
External links
Declaration of resolution-independence by John Siracusa
Digital imaging