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LukeShu 4 days ago

Fascinating.

My setup: Firefox on X11 on a ThinkPad E15 Gen 2, with X11 misconfigured such that it is 96 DPI instead of the physically-correct 144 DPI.

On initial load, it has the green calibrated box saying "Detected: 24″ FHD Monitor (Auto-calibrated)", and my credit card measures as 131mm. This more-or-less the error that I'd expect given my misconfiguration: 131mm/85.6mm =~ 1.53 ; 144dpi/96dpi = 1.5. (Given those numbers, I figure it should be closer to 23" than 24", but whatever.)

But if I tell it "Standard Laptop", then my credit card measures as 97mm. (97mm/85.6mm =~ 1.13). I can't guess how that number is being arrived at. IME lots of X11 users will have their DPI misconfigured as either 96 DPI or (less likely) 192 DPI, but also lots of non-Apple laptops will have a pixel density of 40%-65% more than 96 DPI (on the rationale that lots misconfigured-as- or hardcoded-as- 96 DPI is common, that things designed to look good at 96 DPI assume a desktop monitor about 28" from your face (CSS3 defines device-independent pixels as such), but laptop use puts the screen 17"-20" from your face; and 28in/20in gives us a factor of 1.4 and 28in/17in gives us a factor of 1.65. But none of these numbers give me the factor of 1.13 that you show me. A good mystery!

johnisgood 4 days ago | parent [-]

Take a look at https://anruler.com/js/ruler.js, specifically from the autoDetectDevice function.