[winswitch] Xpra 0.7 and retina screen

[Mehmet Fidanboylu]

I think I might have found the answer to this. I said the following in my
original email: "I dont think this is caused by the X server on client
side. Starting up native apps like Terminal look sharp." What I noticed
later is that, the title bars etc of applications started on XQuartz did
not look sharp. So, I went and read wikipedia :). Here's what it says:

"As of version 2.7.2, X11.app/XQuartz does not expose support for
high-resolution Retina displays<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_display> to
X11 apps, which run in pixel-doubled mode on high-resolution displays."

Problem is not solved but at least now we know the main issue.


On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Mehmet Fidanboylu <mehmetf at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thanks for the reply Antoine. I will give more details:
>
> I changed the resolution manually in the client startup code, more specifically here: https://www.xpra.org/trac/browser/tags/v0.7.x/src/xpra/client.py#L15 . I thought this is how Xvfb was deciding the image size to be sent. Of course this is quite naive as I am sure the frame HxW (among other things) also comes into picture. My max "server" resolution is 3840x2560. So, I figured that is not a problem.
>
> I tried using the --dpi switch to no avail both client and server (dpi=300). My server is Xvfb (since that is what i see running via ps x). I installed the debian packages directly from http://xpra.org/dists/lucid/main/binary-amd64/
>
> Yes, I am sure this is not encoding related but I tried your suggestion anyway. Even with PNG, the image/fonts are soft.
>
> Since then, I downloaded an app called QuickRes that lets me turn off scaling completely and actually use the full 2880x1800 resolution. I took some screenshots for both scaled and unscaled versions. I included the window title text for comparison. If you zoom in both pictures, you can clearly see that in the unscaled version the resolution for both window title (native) and firefox menu (xpra) looks the same. Whereas in the scaled version, xpra looks much worse.
>
> I am afraid the solution to this is going to require an in-depth understanding of how retina scaling works and I understand this is not a priority for xpra. I just found this problem interesting and wanted to see if there was a hack to circumvent the issue.
>
>