[plug] Dell 9400

[Alex Nordstrom]

Tuesday, 2 May 2006 09:41, Gregory Orange wrote:
> Drool, UXGA - can you read anything without a magnifying glass
> though?

Technically, 1920x1200 is WUXGA. I've used a SXGA+ (1400x1050) on a 15" 
laptop screen (117 ppi) and I'm now on a 1600x1200 21" CRT (100 ppi). I 
find anything less strains my eyes. Of course, the critical figure here 
is not number of pixels, but resolution. A 12pt font should always be 
about 4.23mm in height, so the only thing adding more pixels should do 
is give a higher resolution, i.e. sharpness, just like adding more dots 
per inch when printing. That should make it easier, not harder, to 
read.

The "trick" is to make X aware of the resolution (for KDM, that means 
appending -dpi 100 (or whatever, and yes, this should be called ppi) to 
the ServerArgsLocal item in your /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc. With that, a 12pt 
font should be just that.

There are, of course, one or two problems. The biggest one is the number 
of incompetent web designers who assume that everyone will be happy 
with fonts that are 3 pixels in height and that they will never set 
their browsers to enforce a minimum greater than that. Hello 
whereis.com.au!

Another issue is that this does not take into account one's distance to 
the screen. One will generally sit further away from a large CRT than 
from a laptop screen, so font sizes should be larger to compensate. I'm 
looking forward to the day when we can specify not only the screen's 
resolution, but also our viewing distance and have the system calculate 
appropriate font scalings.

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://lx.n3.net/
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to plug.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20060502/62d76d34/attachment.pgp>