Hi, Am 06.10.2014 um 00:35 schrieb Alexander von Gluck IV <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > I think maybe going "dpcm" is a better idea (metric) > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_centimetre) I would like to stick to the unit „point“, which is a well established typographic unit. It doesn’t really matter how big a "point“ is in another unit, be it cm or inch. There are several big APIs which use point, Cocoa and Swing are two examples that I know of. And font sizes were specified in points for ages. The real problem with a change to the Haiku API is how to do it in a backward compatible way. At first glance, you may think it is easy, but it is not. The problem areas are BPictures, BBitmaps and printing. When you have a BBitmap and use BView drawing to fill it with content, you do not know what purpose this bitmap is going to be used for. Is it for rendering to the screen later? Or for printing? Or for saving to a file? You can’t just apply some scaling based on the screen DPI. I’ve chatted with Jonathan a bit about this, we thought BBitmaps could get a resolution parameter which defaults to 72 DPI (i.e. a 1:1 mapping of points to pixels). New applications can set it, for old ones the behavior does not change when the BBitmap is rendered to the screen. Maybe this is enough already, maybe not. The BeBook has always documented the BView drawing coordinates to mean pixels, so that is what applications assume. Changing the coordinate meaning to points surely has potential for lot of problems. It is a worthwhile project, and one that really needs doing soon. I wish I still had the time to work on it. I hope whoever decides to take it on does it publicly so others have the chance to provide input. Best regards, -Stephan