Icons went soft under UI_SCALE while the clock text beside them stayed
sharp, which is visible on a 24" monitor even if it hides on a TV.
new_from_file_at_scale rasterises an SVG at its *logical* size. The
artwork is vector, but by the time sway scaled the session it was
already a fixed raster, and the compositor enlarged that. Text never had
the problem because GTK draws it at the real density.
GTK 3 has no fractional scaling, so sway advertises the ceiling integer
scale and scales the finished buffer down. Measured under sway: scale
factor 1 at output scale 1.0, and 2 at 1.25, 1.5 and 2.0. So each icon
is now rasterised at size x scale_factor physical pixels and handed to
GTK as a cairo surface carrying that device scale. The icon lands at the
real density; its logical size, and the whole dock layout, is unchanged.
Icons redraw on notify::scale-factor as well as at realize, since the
scale factor is not known until a widget is on a display and changes if
UI_SCALE is changed under a running session.
Browser, DVD, LIVE and all six DVD control icons go through it, in a
shared module so the dock and the DVD session cannot diverge. The
throbber is drawn rather than loaded and had the same flaw, so it draws
on a device-scaled surface too rather than being the one soft thing left
in a sharp dock.
The artwork is untouched. Verified by rendering the dock under sway at
1.0, 1.25, 1.5 and 2.0 against the previous build: apparent icon size is
identical at every scale (28, 35, 42, 56 px), 1.0 is unchanged
pixel-for-pixel, and peak edge contrast on the Chrome icon goes from 60
to 99 at 1.25, 49 to 83 at 1.5, and 37 to 82 at 2.0 out of 255. The DVD
control bar was checked the same way.
Also records that Wonder Ink session-only cookies are confirmed working
on the endpoint, which settles the question 0.1.34 shipped as unverified
and tells us the session is in cookies rather than localStorage.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
UI_SCALE only ever reached the surfaces we draw ourselves. Chrome stayed
tiny — its tabs, omnibox and menus are Chrome's own pixels, and Ctrl+
only scales page content, which is no use to a volunteer reading a
toolbar from across the room.
UI_SCALE is a property of the television, not of one program, so it now
sets sway's output scale, which every client is measured against.
classroom-scale runs first in the session and applies it. The display
mode is untouched: the panel stays at 1920x1080 and only the logical
coordinate space shrinks, which is what makes everything in it larger.
Our own surfaces stop scaling themselves. They are measured in the same
logical pixels sway is already scaling, so applying UI_SCALE again would
double it. SHELL_SCALE is that decision in one named place, and setting
it back to ui_scale(config) would restore per-surface scaling without
touching a template.
Measured at 1920x1080 with Chrome 152. Chrome's tab strip 40 -> 49 ->
59px against 1.0, 1.25, 1.5; sway's title bar 25 -> 31 -> 38px; the
classroom dock 74 -> 92 -> 110px. Everything scales once, together, and
1.0 is identical to no scaling at all.
Two tradeoffs, both measured rather than assumed. GTK 3 has no
fractional scaling, so at 1.5 it renders at 2x and sway scales down —
very slightly softer, invisible at classroom distance. XWayland is
softer too: terminal text at 1.5 showed about 50% more intermediate-tone
pixels than at 1.0. VLC is the only XWayland application here, and in
DVD mode none of its interface is on screen, only video from a 720x480
disc that is being upscaled regardless. Chrome is a native Wayland
client and stays sharp, which is what matters for reading.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
A 32" panel a few feet from the children and a 65" set across a hall
want the same design at different sizes. UI_SCALE in device.conf now
sets that, and nobody has to edit CSS or source to tune a room.
The stylesheet and the notification config become templates carrying
measurement tokens. classroom-dock resolves the stylesheet in memory at
startup; classroom-notifications resolves the notification config into
the session's runtime directory and execs mako on it, so the process is
still just mako and everything that looks for it by name still finds it.
Neither template is rewritten on disk, so an update cannot lose a room's
setting and a room cannot drift from the packaged design.
Dock height and the reserved strip, corner radii, padding, button size,
spacing, every icon, the clock and its inset, and the notification
geometry all follow the scale. Colours, translucency and the hairline
borders do not: those are the design, not the size.
At UI_SCALE=1.0 the rendered stylesheet is byte-identical to the one the
shell used before any of this existed, which is the property worth
keeping. Values outside 0.8 to 1.5 are clamped and anything that is not
a number falls back to 1.0, so a typo in device.conf cannot produce an
unusable classroom.
Device configuration moves into a shared module, since the dock and the
notification daemon now have to agree about what a setting means.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
