Support to render at 200% of real screen resolution - for screenshots and magnifier
Feature summary
There are several use cases that would benefit from rendering at the resolution higher than the real resolution of the screen, and then downscaling the result. This is 99% similar to the existing fractional-scaling mechanism.
The use cases are:
- I have a laptop that has a 13" screen and only 1920x1080 resolution, and often participate in remote meetings that involve screen sharing by the other parties. The problem is - some of these people have desktops with big 4K screens, and don't change their settings to accommodate me. So the letters in their terminals, code editors, browsers, and so on, are tiny on my screen. I thought: OK, maybe I could use the accessibility feature that magnifies the screen, to see clearly what they are talking about. Nope, doesn't work - the browser renders at 1920x1080, and the magnifier doesn't have any extra pixels to zoom. In other words, instead of tiny unreadable letters, I get non-tiny but still unreadable letters - unreadable because blurry. Please allow me to give the magnifier some extra pixels to work on.
- Some publishers started requiring Hi-DPI screenshots for inclusion into the printed/published materials. However, just setting 200% screen scale is limiting the screen real estate too much.
How would you like it to work
I was able to overcome both issues by setting the fractional scale to 125% - then the browser in the meetings does render all those little details that the magnifier then successfully picks up from otherwise-wasted pixels. In fact, hacking the monitors.xml file to set the scale to 1.0000001 and then optionally using the Large Text accessibility feature (for local text) also works, and I, purely subjectively, like the result even more. But what if somebody is satisfied with the 1.0x scaling factor but needs the extra resolution for the magnifier or for high-quality screenshots? In other words, render double-size at 4K and then downscale to 1920x1080. Maybe there should be a less-hackish way to achieve rendering with the same effective 1.0x scale factor, but with extra resolution, which is wasted, except for screenshots or when the screen magnifier is active.
I fully understand that this is something advanced, has performance implications, and should only be exposed via the Tweaks app.