Resolution - DPI, PPI & LPI (was: Wide PNG's displaying only coloured stripes?)

[Richard Gaskin]

With all the DPI, PPI, and LPI we forgot the beloved twips.  Fortunately 
there's little to learn at the moment on that since they're going away:
<http://visualbasic.about.com/cs/visualbasicfaq/a/dykpixeltwip.htm>
We'll miss them. :)

Resolution independence is a big hairy mess.  Useful, but a mess just 
the same. During this transition we can expect it to be almost as 
complicating as Unicode considering the breadth of its scope and the 
ever-increasing range of display devises.  Heck, with just the Macs in 
my office I have three different PPIs at play.

Apple has some UI notes on resolution independence:
<http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsImaging/RN-ResolutionIndependentUI/>

The upside is that for the long term it seems we'll eventually need some 
sort of scaling factor built in to handle all of the vectors throughout 
the engine, and once that's done it should be a snap to extend that to 
allow us to build zoom-in/zoom-out features into any of our apps.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com