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Window Managers for High Resolution Displays?

cfish asks: "Recently, I was told by a manager at a major monitor maker that CRTs are phasing out. I have a very weak eye and I read text at 1024x768 on a 21" monitor, sitting 2 feet away. Each alphabet is about 1/4" tall. What makes me panic is the fact that LCDs have fixed resolution and they are simply too small for me to read icons and widget text, like Microsoft's. This is a great chance for Linux to get a head start in a certain market: older folks and those who have eye strain problems. Generally speaking, not many people can read Microsoft's widget text on a 150dpi display, which may explain why no one buys them even that they are available. Imagine how frustrating it could be for medical display (x-rays), cad, image editing to have a high resolution realistic image but cannot read the menu and text. If someone can come up with a Window manager to beat MS on 200dpi displays, no doubt this will capture a strong following in image related applications. I have read about these debates 5 years ago. What has been done about it?"

382 comments

  1. Workaround for you... by eaglebtc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ya know, LCDs don't *have* to be run at their native resolution all the time. You are free to set an LCD to run at 640x480, 800x600, or whatever you like. The nice thing about a 200dpi LCD display is that you can run it lower than the native resolution and still get a great looking picture. Another thing...Windows can be set to a higher "dpi" than its traditional 96. This will increase the font size for EVERYTHING. Just go to Display Properties > Settings > Advanced, and select the "DPI" from the General tab that you wish to use. Beware, as some applications may not look right because they weren't designed to use that resolution. FP!

    --
    Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
    1. Re:Workaround for you... by B1ackDragon · · Score: 2, Funny

      That was incredibly informative... and he even got the FP in there too (and he's actually the FP).

      That has to be the best post EVER.

      --
      The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
    2. Re:Workaround for you... by utexaspunk · · Score: 2, Redundant

      yeah, and everything looks CLUNKY AS HELL when you do that. It's not like Quartz on OSX where everything scales properly. only the text gets bigger, everything else stays the same size, which means everything gets way F'd up. Hopefully they'll get this fixed in future versions...

    3. Re:Workaround for you... by edwdig · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, LCDs don't have to run at their native resolution. But they really look like crap at lower resolutions. Particuarlly for displaying text. Which would make things worse for the guy asking the question.

      Run the monitor at its native resolution, tell Windows to use Extra Large fonts, and make sure to set the anti-aliasing to ClearType. ClearType actually makes a very big difference on how legible the text is. I think that's the best bet on getting a legible display on Windows with an LCD.

    4. Re:Workaround for you... by Tet · · Score: 5, Interesting
      You are free to set an LCD to run at 640x480, 800x600, or whatever you like.

      Sure, you're free to run it at whatever resolution you like. Of course, unlike a CRT, it'll look like shit most of the time, but hey, flat panels are sexy, right, so who cares? To be fair, if your full reolution is an integer multiple of your scaled resultion, then it'll be a bit blocky, but otherwise OK. Personally, I'll be sticking with my CRT for some time yet.

      For cfish, my advice is relax. Yes, in time, CRTs will be phased out of the mass market. But they'll still be around for the forseeable future, they'll just be a niche device, so you won't be able to get them from high street shops. Even then, that's still a fair way off...

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    5. Re:Workaround for you... by kannibal_klown · · Score: 1

      Also, Windows lets you adjust the scale of the fonts. I don't mean by changing the font size-point (10, 12). But under the video advanced settings, you can adjust it to preset sizes: Normal, Large. Or even set it to a custom setting.

    6. Re:Workaround for you... by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, LCDs don't have to run at their native resolution. But they really look like crap at lower resolutions. Particuarlly for displaying text.

      If the target image pixel size does not map to the screen pixel size in a clean fraction (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc), then some pixels "consume" more of the image than others, making for lumpy-looking text. Averaging could be used, but that would make the edges of the text fuzzier.

      CRT's are still the king of multi-resolutions.

      Using "Large Fonts" settings is probably a better option to try than non-native LCD resolution.

    7. Re:Workaround for you... by AragornCG · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.

      Oh well. Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.

    8. Re:Workaround for you... by Skater · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My experience is that the early ones are as you describe, but the more recent models (in the last year or so) are much better about this. In fact, the current LCD I have and the previous one were both specified to run at 1280x1024, but I've always run them at 1024x768, and they look great.

      --RJ

    9. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, the submitter was talking about 200 dpi displays. These (as yet largely mythical) displays would be able to scale down nicely. A 3840x2400 display, for example, can scale down to 1920x1200 at 4:1, or 1280x800 at 9:1, or even 960x600 at 16:1.

      A 1280x1024 display, though, can only scale down evenly to 640x512... which isn't especially helpful unless you're legally blind. This fellow isn't.

    10. Re:Workaround for you... by WhaDaYaKnow · · Score: 4, Funny

      But but, you don't understand. You can't just go ahead and come up with solutions that have worked on M$ products for years now.

      This was supposed to be the killer app for Linux to obtain world domination! It was to open up that huge untapped market of 'older folks and those who have eye strain problems', because everyone knows that Linux is _the_ product for older folks. The only thing keeping it back was the font size.

      ---

      I can't believe this story was posted. The story should have read: I don't know how to configure my system, what do I do?

      (And to all the replies bitching about an LCD being ugly at lower resolutions, read the gawdamn comment. There is a perfectly viable alternative at native resolution. btw. I have a friend who is practically blind, and he actually chooses to run his 1600x1200 LCD at 800x600 mode. He's happy as a clam)

    11. Re:Workaround for you... by cscx · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      I have no idea what the article writer was saying... whether he is just stupid or just another anti-MS troll. Increasing font sizes (and icon sizes) under Windows is incredibly easy, a thousand-thousand fold easier than a comparing Linux window manager.... even the "easy" ones... ever seen the configuration page for Sawfish? Christ!

    12. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.

      How do you figure? When demand drops, things get cheaper for a while until the supply drops to meet demand at some price point. Unfortunately for you, the demand will have dropped to the point where the economy of scale isn't what it used to be and the price will have to go up. Add to this increasingly stringent government regulations (8 pounds of lead per monitor, anybody?) and the situation doesn't look so good for tubes.

    13. Re:Workaround for you... by timeOday · · Score: 3, Informative
      No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.


      Guess what, you could say exactly the same thing about your beloved CRTs, because they have dot pitch. The only difference has been that traditionally the dot pitch was smaller than the pixels on LCDs. But as your parent mentioned, 200 dpi LCDs will scale well. Those will be ready in plenty of time before CRTs become specialty items.

    14. Re:Workaround for you... by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 1
      To be fair, in a typical Linux set up, changing fonts is usually restricted to like programs; i.e. you change all GNOME applications at once, all KDE, etc.

      If you run a homogenous GNOME or KDE setup, you get a much more unified system, and things are even simpler than Windows.

      Once each desktop gets enough software for its respected platform, or different platforms get unified, expect big changes in the perceived difficulty of Linux.

      Leave it up to distros to throw in all the software plus the kitchen sink and bundle it without thought of interpolation.

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    15. Re:Workaround for you... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1
      You've probably never seen a properly tuned and set up LCD display. Get it to phase lock perfectly by adjusting on a 1-pixel checkerboard (like an old X background) until there are no artifacts (my monitor has automatic lock fine tuning, but it only works perfectly when such a bitmap is displayed).

      Turn on sub-pixel sampling (a.k.a. ClearType). Now you've effectively got 3840x1024 resolution in the luminance channel on text. You'll never go back to a fuzzy 100 pound room heating CRT again, even if it's a high-quality 21" unit.

    16. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      If you have a really high-res (>150ppi) LCD with a better interpolation algorithm than nearest neighbor, then lower resolutions scale really well. For someone who has reduced eye sight, there will probably no difference between a properly scaled image on a high-res LCD compared to the same resolution on a CRT of the same size.

    17. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "LCDs are teh suxors. CRTS are l33t"

      What a dork.

    18. Re:Workaround for you... by josh+crawley · · Score: 5, Informative

      In Windows, the OS is precisely compliant to what the application developer wanted the program to do. For instance, if I write a web page with an "img src" tag with the height and width set in pixels, then the image will be that size, regardless of the resolution of the monitor. If I set the height and width in a proportional unit like points, or to be a percentage of the window size, then it will scale along with everything else. Programming using Windows Forms works the same way, although I know some of the old widgets refused scaling (I seem to recall some difference in the Picture vs Bitmap control in VB 5 or 6).

      In other words, it's up to the app developer to base their UI on the dynamic System Properties rather than on fixed values. If, for instance, Windows YP was developed to "override" fixed pixel sizes and try to make them proportional, it would probably screw up more than it would fix.

    19. Re:Workaround for you... by tmark · · Score: 1

      Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.

      Actually, as more people buy LCD monitors the price you are likely to pay for your next Trinitron will be higher.

    20. Re:Workaround for you... by Acous · · Score: 1

      you don't understand what he's saying.

      he's say if you try to run an lcd at something that's not it's native resolution, it looks like crap. also, if you use DVI or other digital connection, you won't have to "tune" your shiny new LCD display.

    21. Re:Workaround for you... by realdpk · · Score: 1

      See also: 72pin SIMMs. :)

    22. Re:Workaround for you... by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I guess that is true: if you have high enough LCD resolution/density, then the slight blur caused by interpolation is probably not going to matter much to somebody with poor eyesight to begin with. Then again, the author did not say much about the kind of eye problem they have.

    23. Re:Workaround for you... by thogard · · Score: 1

      Running 800x600 on a 1600x1200 lcd works fine for someone with 20/40 or worse vision. However running 800x600 on a 1024x768 LCD may cause them many problems. You may also find that many of the larger screens tend to be resolutions that don't scale well from 800x600 or 1024x768 (which are about the only two useable sizes that most people would even try)

      I was talking to my mother about this an hour ago. She wants to find a computer store where she can look at different brands of displays while sitting down with about the same level of light as her house. So far she hasn't found any shops like that.

    24. Re:Workaround for you... by Unregistered · · Score: 1

      Even then, that's still a fair way off...

      Not really. I tried to buy a crt recently and CompUSA has nothing but shitty ones. They all look like they've been sitting on the shelf for at least a year and some look affirmatavely broken. I had to get one off ebay since i thionk it's stupid to pay a lot to get a high-end lcd that looks no worse than a pretty normal crt.

    25. Re:Workaround for you... by moonbender · · Score: 1

      Maybe you should have considered a different store than CompUSA...

      I recently considered buying a CRT, thinking that innovation has largely stop and now that they're not as cool as LCDs anymore, they ought to be cheap - well not really. There's still some innovation, and the high-end 19" and 21" ones are still way too expensive for my purse.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    26. Re:Workaround for you... by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Like first. You missed.

      Making extra large fonts already corrupts half of the apps just as setting DPI corrupts few of them.

      That kind of solution might work out in some other environment, Windows interface as in widget is just too clumsy to take on that. That was the main reason for switching my own apps from windows.

      Ok, I still write windows apps (although I trewat them mainly as linux apps which happen to run on windows too), it's just that I develop them under Linux with GTK which runs fine in all environments and containers provided with gtk make that kind of solution a reality.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    27. Re:Workaround for you... by dtfinch · · Score: 1

      Setting the dpi in windows only scales fonts.

      What I think a lot of people are looking for is full scaling. Programs that aren't aware of the scaling would think they were running at a certain resolution, when in fact everything they do would be scaled up to a much higher resolution. Vector graphics (such as text) would be rendered at the higher resolution.

      Switching to a higher resolution would mean an increase in quality, and not necessarily a decrease in proportions. Resolution and size could be adjusted independently of each other. Someone with a low resolution display could even simulate a higher resolution if they wanted.

      The Windows Longhorn demo videos suggested that it might support this, so time may be running out for anyone who wants to beat them to it.

    28. Re:Workaround for you... by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      By the way I forgot to mention...

      Setting Cleartype doesn't make all apps use Cleartype

      Most apps stays with original non-aliased fonts, I just don't understand how is this possible if Windows has one solution for everything as they say.

      That's as far as I can say for that topic. Btw, I'm using XP to connect to my bank account. And notebook has 1400x1050 for 15" which is clearly too small to be usable. My current setting is Normal fonts, 120DPI and Cleartype.

      And compared to scaling in Gnome2, I must say XP sucks major

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    29. Re:Workaround for you... by AragornCG · · Score: 1

      There will be a sweet spot very, very soon now. In fact, it already exists.

      Time to rent a warehouse and stock up before mass production of good CRTs is discontinued... :)

    30. Re:Workaround for you... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1
      un the monitor at its native resolution, tell Windows to use Extra Large fonts

      Note that using large fonts mode is not recommended. Many MANY programs do not display properly in large fonts mode. Manually set all your font sizes higher.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    31. Re:Workaround for you... by Jaysyn · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but it's pretty obvious he's never used AutoCAD or ArcGIS at 800x600. I'll stick to my 21" ViewSonic CRT, thanks all the same.

      Jaysyn

      --
      There is a war going on for your mind.
    32. Re:Workaround for you... by Fizzlewhiff · · Score: 2, Informative

      All that said, if you take an LCD designed to display 1024x768 and run it at 800x600 your web page, windows forms, even the text in notepad is going to look like shat. This isn't about scaling and sizing widgets, it is about the capability of the LCD.

      --

      'Same speed C but faster'
    33. Re:Workaround for you... by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 1

      If the guy has trouble reading text on a normal monitor, he probably won't notice how blurry it is.

    34. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And notebook has 1400x1050 for 15" which is clearly too small to be usable.

      You must either have very poor vision or a very poor display.

      I regularly use my Toshiba 5200 with its 15" screen at its native 1600x1200 resolution and I love it. It's extremely "usuable". I would never consider running it at a lower resolution. That display is one of the main reasons I bought it in the first place!

    35. Re:Workaround for you... by haoto · · Score: 4, Interesting

      One problem is that 1024x768 and 1280x1024 are in different proportions, so the images you get will be a little stretched out. To maintain original proportions you will need to find a larger screen with 1400x1050 or 1600x1200 resolution, but they seem to be still unreasonably expensive and rare.

    36. Re:Workaround for you... by Dahan · · Score: 1
      Note that using large fonts mode is not recommended.

      Not recommended by you, perhaps, but recommended by me :)

      Many MANY programs do not display properly in large fonts mode.

      ...such as...? I run my WinXP system at Custom (139% normal size, 133dpi). Everything I run (mostly development tools like Visual Studio, and occasionally Office) looks great. Well, one thing I did notice is that the little Signal Strength meter on XP's wireless connection status window isn't vertically aligned with its caption--it's a little too high and overlaps the Speed display slightly. I actually reported it to Microsoft during the XP beta, but they said they wouldn't fix it for the release. I was hoping they'd do something about it in SP1, but it's still there. Nothing major though...

      Now, some poorly-designed web pages look like crap, since they use CSS and absolute pixel sizes and positioning, making everything too tiny. Or even worse, mix the two (physical sizes for fonts, but pixel sizes for positioning DIVs, so the text ends up too big for the boxes and things overlap illegibly).

    37. Re:Workaround for you... by Tet · · Score: 1
      high-end 19" and 21" ones are still way too expensive for my purse.

      And still more than 60% cheaper than an equivalently sized (and lower spec) LCD.

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    38. Re:Workaround for you... by Alan+Partridge · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      You're distorting the shape of your desktop - didn't it occur to you that 1280x1024 is a 5:4 ratio whereas 1024x768 is 4:3?

      Just what kind of a geek are you?

      --
      That was classic intercourse!
    39. Re:Workaround for you... by Webmonger · · Score: 1

      In other words, it's up to the app developer to base their UI on the dynamic System Properties rather than on fixed values

      You say that like it's a good thing.

      Time and time again, Windows developers have shown they can't be trusted to future-proof their apps.

      Anyhow, using bitmaps for UI is an optimization that has overstayed its welcome. Vectors are far cooler.

      The only reason bitmaps were better in the old days is that screen resolution was universally crappy. Back in the day, we had 320x200, and we were grateful. (Apparently, there was even a CGA 160x100 high-colour mode.) We had to target every pixel, because a difference of one pixel was huge.

      The monitor I'm using right now supports 1600x1200, but I'm running at 1280x960 because I don't want everything to be tiny. This is a travesty. Resolution shouldn't affect size, just detail. With OS X, that's how it works.

    40. Re:Workaround for you... by dnahelix · · Score: 1

      I don't think "they really look like crap at lower resolutions." They are blurred a bit on some, but fully legible. The original post seemed to think that switching resolutions is impossible. not so.

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    41. Re:Workaround for you... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1
      See? Even you can cite an example of a Microsoft program whose current version does not properly support large fonts mode. Come on, listen to what you're saying here.

      Anyway this problem will likely go away in Longhorn when Windows gets a device-independent interface. Until then, it will continue.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    42. Re:Workaround for you... by NanoGator · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Time and time again, Windows developers have shown they can't be trusted to future-proof their apps."

      Why do people compare Windows developers to Linux developers as if they live on opposite sides of the planet?

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    43. Re:Workaround for you... by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Nope, I'm just used to work with comfortable environment. Gnome2 is working like a charm for me, no problems there and as that's my default environment...

      I posted that two times already so I"ll do it once more for you.

      In Windows icons are either too small or too blury when you select big icons (sorry if I'm more selective than you but I preffer perfection).

      Text by default is too small with small fonts, but when you select different sizes most of dialog boxes get screwed

      If you select different DPIs some other dialogs and windows sizes get screwed and some fonts don't get resized

      Cleartype doesn't work for alll apps, most of them still have old fonts without antialiasing.

      I regularly use my Toshiba 5200 with its 15" screen at its native 1600x1200 resolution and I love it. It's extremely "usuable". I would never consider running it at a lower resolution. That display is one of the main reasons I bought it in the first place!

      I belive it is "usuable", but I don't believe it's "usable", That kind of display might be usable only for softwares where people mostly use shortcuts and demand higher resolution as Photoshop does. AND I'm glad you're happy as I'm with mine.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    44. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      This problem happens because you are using a resolution that is not an even division of pixel counts. For example, if you have a native 1600 x 1200 monitor and run it in 1028 x 768 then you'll have horrid looking jagged edges on everything because it will be interpolating pixels between pixels. Or using 1 1/4 pixel for each pixel or some other fraction which an LCD can't display. But if you run in 800 x 600 it will simply use 4 whole pixels square to represent 1 pixel at the lower resolution. It's all depending on what the native resolution is to what you can adjust the resolution to without artifacts. You may have noticed improvement in this recently simply because LCD monitors are much higher resolution than they used to be, but the same problem still exists.

      My suggestion to this fellow is to simply quarter (half each dimension) his resolution to get the desired "largeness" and keep dividing in half until it's large enough. Crude, but it's a heck of a lot easier than rewriting 10 million lines of display code plus another 10 million lines to port your Windows software to Linux.

    45. Re:Workaround for you... by josh+crawley · · Score: 1

      With OS X, that's how it works.

      That's really just because Apple's control of the hardware and the OS has allowed them dictatorial control w/r/t APIs. I can't say I have first hand knowledge of OSX development, I would imagine it's hard to get text rendered in the screen buffer without using a certain Apple API which ensures that everything scales right with resolution, as well as complying with all the Aqua goodies (transparency, slurping windows, etc.). So it's a tradeoff of the developer's control of things vs. standardization.

      I can put an entry in a CSS style sheet which says that all checkboxes on my web page should be rendered as 8 pixels high. Of course, this is going to kill people who are running at 1600x1200. Does this mean that this ability shouldn't be allowed in the CSS spec? No, it has its uses, but I'm a bad developer for using it in the wrong place. Also, if I do use it for a reason, I don't expect a browser to override it and change my page's display.

      Also, for what it's worth, I'm running at 1600x1200 right now. I know it has it's shortcomings in some places (Microsoft Money especially), but 90% of the UI is scaled the way I want it.

    46. Re:Workaround for you... by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 1

      I'm not convinced LCDs are worth the benefit... we just got some huge Dell LCD screens (2 each per machine... these are not cheap puppies). The screens look like crap - in fact I've already asked if I can keep my CRT because even looking at the LCD for a few minutes made my eyes hurt (and I'm not even going to *describe* the horror when someone turned cleartype on - I had to look away from the screen because I couldn't even focus on it).

      Call them 'badly adjusted' if you like, but these are top of the range LCDs from a quality manufacturer, running at their native resolution. Since LCDs currently cost more than double the equivalent CRT price I doubt home users will start using them for some years yet.

    47. Re:Workaround for you... by Webmonger · · Score: 0, Troll

      I dunno. I didn't compare Windows developers to Linux developers.

      The Windows GUI hands a lot of control to the developer. They can't be trusted with that power. They do stupid things like writing GUIs with system privileges.

      There are big differences between the output of a paid Windows development team and a volunteer open-source developer, but they're not a different species. They may even be the same person at work and at play.

      In any case, I'm saying a well-designed API is hard to use wrong and easy to use right.

    48. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you actually tried changing the DBI in windows. I have very poor vision and usually keep the display at 1024x768 with the windows DPI set so that the fonts are %150 larger then normal. It works great. Except most programs break when you do this. Many programs have fixed window sizes so the fonts end up getting cut off and you can't read them at all. Also many dialogs become too big to fit on the screen. The mozilla preferences dialog is a good example.

      Changing the DPI is a great feature. The problem is people don't test there software with it and in the end it is only half as helpful as it could be.

    49. Re:Workaround for you... by Dahan · · Score: 1

      The problem with Windows that I mentioned is very minor, and doesn't affect usability at all. I'm still waiting for you to cite an example of a program that is practically unusable with large fonts.

    50. Re:Workaround for you... by eclectro · · Score: 1


      You touch upon an interesting point, and the crux of where linux is today.

      Linux has never been known for it's user friendliness. If it had, it would be everywhere and MS stock would be trading under a dollar. Sure windows is no hero in this department either, but everybody knows it quirks. In most instances people can futz their way through most things, and have their twelve year old grandson help them with the rest.

      Linux has always, and shall be "of the geek" "for the geek". Yes, it is improving, but it nowhere compares with a mac.

      But that seems to be the way with alot of technology products that an older generation doesn't know how to (or won't) deal with (like the flashing 12:00 on the vcr problem).

      In as much that this poster could possibly find a workaround for windows to accomplish what he needs, it does point out this weakness (as your mother needing to see the displays under the same light as her house). I'm sure that there is a market for products that adresses these needs (like TIVO), but one has to wonder if such a market will be nothing more than a "niche". Like the can openers with big comfortable easy to use grips that doesn't stop the cheaper/less reliable alternative from being sold by the millions. I suppose that this is in the realm that economists dwell in.

      The fact is that linux was never intended as an easy to use OS for the mainstream. It was meant as a unix clone, something entirely different. Sure there are those that fantasize about it, but at best user friendliness is "shoe-horned" in linux almost as an afterthought. It will probably remain that way while "insensitive clod" geeks remain in charge of the CVS trees.

      --
      Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
    51. Re:Workaround for you... by pyrote · · Score: 3, Interesting

      the "*" could be an indication... he saw it a few minutes before the mindless FP war.

      although I do admit, for a FP it works... BTW that trick works quite nicely on a microtron monitor. although I still would rather get better glasses than lose screen real-estate.

      Don't be afraid to screw with the extend settings of ClearText either, on a trinitron/microtron/lcd it makes things nice and smooth, especially higher than 96dpi text. Personally I drive any display at it's peak and tweak the fonts to match.

      --
      THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
    52. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      By the way I forgot to mention...

      Setting Cleartype doesn't make all apps use Cleartype

      The ClearType setting (or any setting affecting text, like DPI) will be 'used' by all apps that render text using standard Windows API, which all do. There are probably a couple DTP apps that do their own text drawing, but that's pretty fucking rare.

    53. Re:Workaround for you... by doug363 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Windows does have a device independent graphics interface. It's called GDI, and Windows has had it since Windows 1.0. This is one reason that Windows printing is generally more WYSIWYG than on other some other platforms which have different display/printer interfaces. It's just that many programs are written badly: they use the absolute pixel scaling mode, and don't respect the user's display settings.

      GDI can easily be set to use millimetres as the dimension, or inches, or whatever. But it doesn't always give great results when you're drawing things like icons, which have standard pixel sizes to make them look good on a screen. And most display drivers report a 96 DPI screen by default, no matter what the screen actually is, because of badly written programs that expect 96 DPI screens. So most programs don't use the device-independent scaling modes when drawing their user interfaces. Those that play nice with large fonts generally use special code to scale UI components properly when the user has a different font size selected. Some widget APIs do this automatically: QT, GTK, and Borland's VCL come to mind.

      So it's the misuse of the existing standards which has caused this problem, rather than the lack of any device-independent interface.

    54. Re:Workaround for you... by Yottabyte84 · · Score: 1

      Anyone who can use Windows can use Linux. My 48 year old mother uses a linux box I set up for her, quite happily, as well as a Windows box at work. She needed some inital hand holdng to do a few things, but she uses it daily for reading email, and word processing.

    55. Re:Workaround for you... by CAIMLAS · · Score: 2, Informative

      You haven't been using the right LCDs, then. Check out Samsung's line, they all do something akin to "pixel blending" at the lower resolutions. I was quite impressed at the aliasing displayed when I installed win2k on an office system w/ one such new LCD.

      --
      ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
    56. Re:Workaround for you... by n3bulous · · Score: 1

      Dell has refurbished 20" 1600x1200 LCDs for US$850. This is much cheaper than a 20" trinitron of 5 years ago. So price is not that unreasonable.

      As for rarity, you are right on. I have not seen any sub-20", non-laptop LCDs that do more than 1280x1024.

      K

      --
      "The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
    57. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Recently I bought an 18" NEC TFT display. Using its native resolution of 1280x1024, the items on the screen were way to small for me so I decided to run it at 1024x768 or 800x600.

      However, since 1280x1024 has a different aspect ratio than 1024x768 (who decided to change the usual 4:3 to 5:4 anyway?), the image was stretched which I didn't consider usable.

      Now of course my display has a function to prevent that from happening, for example, it can be set to keep the aspect ratio by not using the entire screen area (leaving black bars at the top and at the bottom, but I don't mind that).

      That wasn't the whole story though. In order to make this function work, the TFT display needs to be able to actually DETECT that the resolution supplied by the graphics card is lower than 1280x1024. That was not the case. While the Windows resolution was set to 1024x768, the display somehow thought it was 1280x1024 (could be checked in the OSM) and therefore didn't apply the scaling function.

      It turned out that it wasn't solely the display's fault. After trying three different graphics cards (all of which were connected to the display using their respective DVI ports), I've found that it depended on the graphics card whether the display could identify the resolution correctly. The two GeForce Ti4200-based ones didn't work, the Radeon-based ATI card did. Only with Windows, that is. Trying to run a bootable Knoppix CD resulted in the 1024x768 resolution appearing stretched again.

      So if in the future I need to buy a more powerful graphics card (in order to play Doom 3 or something like that), I risk wasting $300 on a card that turns out to be incompatible with my TFT display. (And I won't even tell you the story of already having had to buy a new display because my DFP graphics card that came with my old DFP display didn't fit in the AGP slot of my new motherboard and the DFP/DVI adapter failed to work too.)

    58. Re:Workaround for you... by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Nope software I can count from my mind.

      Compaq monitor software.
      My company bank account app.
      Our accounting software.
      that's probably evertything that runs on XP. btw, Complete shop is on Linux.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    59. Re:Workaround for you... by mikiN · · Score: 1
      Switching resolutions may not be impossible, but whether the result will be satisfying depends on the LCD screen you are using. Many older screens designed at the time when the technology for interpolating pixels at lower resolutions was just coming on the market had notoriously bad image at lower resolutions.

      Commenting on the previous posts: please don't assume that someone has the latest bleeding edge tech at his desk. There are still places on this planit where LCD screens are quite expensive!

      --
      The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
    60. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      Also, if I do use it for a reason, I don't expect a browser to override it and change my page's display.
      Bzzttt... Wrong. The end user should always have final say over how your page is rendered, you the developer should never ever be able to force anything down the users throat just because you thought you knew better than they did.
    61. Re:Workaround for you... by Webmonger · · Score: 1

      Apple may have more control of hardware than Microsoft, but I don't believe that's relevent to the choice of software APIs. This isn't about the device driver model, or anything.

      If anything, Apple's control is less firm than Microsoft's, because developers don't have to support them, but supporting Windows is pretty well mandatory for many kinds of applications.

      Let me vote for standardization. The most convenient interface should expose the recommended set of operations. If there's a demand for the ability to do things the wrong way,
      1. It's an opportunity to improve the design of the recommended API so it can accomodate more developers.
      2. You can expose a second API for "Bad" operations.

      Microsoft seems to be voting for resolution-independence with Longhorn.

      Browsers do override CSS pixel settings. At the user's request, Mozilla will scale the text in any web page, and Opera will scale the bitmaps as well as the text.

      Of course, scaling web page images would look nicer with vectors...

    62. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dell don't manufacture LCD screens.

    63. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about using DVI connection from your video card to your monitor?

      Transporting a digital image to a digital monitor over analog SVGA, therefore going digital-analog-digital with it is technically speaking plain stupid. It's (quality-wise) like copying a CD via a tape recorder.

      It's almost as worse as running the monitor at a non-native resolution (except for those that can turn off the scaling function)

    64. Re:Workaround for you... by cyb97 · · Score: 1

      The point here though, is that with not much hair-pulling your mother would probably be able to install WindowsXP, but would never be able to install Slackware Linux...
      (Lindows seems to be putting a stop to linux being hard to install though)...

    65. Re:Workaround for you... by Tom7 · · Score: 1

      They don't look great to me!! Unlike the tiny phosphors in a CRT, LCDs have specific individual imaging elements for each screen pixel. If you don't run at the native resolution (or an integer divisor of it), then screen pixels will have to be displayed at different widths in different places, which will distort the image. Most modern LCD screens do anti-aliasing in order to minimize this effect, but then you lose the perfect crispness that is (IMO) the best advantage of LCDs over CRTs in the first place.

    66. Re:Workaround for you... by strike2867 · · Score: 1

      If an application does not look right at a lower resolution level then it may not have been designed with a good majority of the users in mind. I think the best option is to design software at something like 800X600 and then add a class that resizes everything on load according to the screen resolution size. This way the program will look the same under any resolution. Particularly easy in VB if you know windows API stuff. I think this is how most screensavers are designed, if you look carefully they look the same no matter what resolution you run them at (except for some that try to be cheap and change the screen resolution on load).

      --

      Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
    67. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, Dell is selling their new ones for $888, this week only.

    68. Re:Workaround for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      who in their right fucking mind would make mom install slackware?

      My mom installed redhat 9 and was up and running just fine.

  2. Change the font size! by danrees · · Score: 4, Informative

    I might be missing the point completely here, but surely for accessibility purposes (i.e. if you have crap vision), the resolution doesn't matter. All you have to do is change the default font size in your window manager... it's hardly revolutionary :S

    1. Re:Change the font size! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The trouble is there are still a lot of apps that specify things in pixel sizes rather than in real units (centimetres) or some other scalable unit (fraction of the total display size). So even if you increase the font size - and that would require a system with fonts that aren't ugly, so you're not forced to use a few predefined bitmaps - you may find everything else is too small.

      It'll be great when everything uses SVG icons which are rendered at the size you choose and at the right resolution for the display, but that day is a way off yet.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    2. Re:Change the font size! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      I second that. I run 1600x1200 with a lot of 14- and 16-point fonts that look amazingly smooth and readable. I'm really not sure what the poster's problem is.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    3. Re:Change the font size! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      Could you give an example of such an app? I haven't had that problem and I'd be curious to see a program that "breaks" at high resolutions.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    4. Re:Change the font size! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      Pretty much every app has the problem. Haven't you noticed dialogue boxes and icons getting smaller as the resolution of the screen increases?

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    5. Re:Change the font size! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've seen thing break at lower resolutions. For example there was a CAD tool I used to work with a lot and one specific menu would open in a window that was taller than my screen with no scroll bars. I still don't know what the last choice was. Just poor design.

    6. Re:Change the font size! by josh+crawley · · Score: 1

      The trouble is there are still a lot of apps that specify things in pixel sizes rather than in real units (centimetres) or some other scalable unit (fraction of the total display size).

      I haven't run across one of these in quite a while; I know that about 8 years ago I saw some apps which were coded in old versions of VB or ported from Win 3.11 which would have problems when run in a high resolution in Win95, but I haven't seen many recently released major apps (in the Win98/2k/XP era) with these problems. I don't think vector icons are that important, as long as icons and bitmaps are used for the right things, and text is always rendered as a scalable font. For instance, I'm at 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor right now, and the "News for Nerds" in the Slashdot logo looks like it's a 10 pt font. If it were rendered as HTML text, it would scale up along with the rest of the stuff based on the browser font size.

    7. Re:Change the font size! by gantrep · · Score: 1

      The Windows Magnifier under accessibility tools can help people to read text that is too small, but I realize this must be a pain; I know I wouldn't want to use it. I agree that there should be a more elegant way of making the UI more readable, but it's not like it's impossible now.

    8. Re:Change the font size! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, text in dialogue boxes scales nowadays, but icons still remain a constant size. Perhaps you're right that this is no big deal (you don't really need to see icons clearly, just have a vague visual memory of which is which).

      It does suck that Windows doesn't allow any more fine-grained control than Small, Large or Extra Large fonts. You should just be able to tell it the size of your monitor and have fonts displayed at the *correct* size, dammit. By which I mean a ten-point font should display with characters ten points high. I don't know how well GNOME and KDE handle this, but there is a way to tell the X server your real display resolution.

      (A point is roughly 1/72 inches, I think. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/metric-typo/ makes a good argument for abandoning the whole 'points' mess and simply stating font size in millimetres.)

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    9. Re:Change the font size! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mozilla. The preferences dialog is not resizable (unless you're willing to dive into the innards of a language pack) and does not adjust its default size to its contents. Window contents overflowing fixed sized windows is the most common problem with big fonts, the complementary problem is text on top of other text because of a fixed layout.

    10. Re:Change the font size! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      Sure, but the poster was referring to small fonts, and not necessarily small icons.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    11. Re:Change the font size! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1
      Mozilla. The preferences dialog is not resizable (unless you're willing to dive into the innards of a language pack) and does not adjust its default size to its contents.

      That answered it - thanks.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    12. Re:Change the font size! by len_harms · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I used to make GUI apps in Windows. Its a REAL pain to get just right for any font at any res. Even with what is called the dialog unit. The problem is you need to develop your app in a wide/tall fixed width font. Then let windows scale it.

      Now the dialog unit is based on the font metrics you are currently using. What is selected into that window context at that time. You can create each control individually. This is a real pain to get child/parent relationships correct with. You could also use the .rc method. However the underlying window resources are based partialy in not dialog units but pixels. It takes whatever font is currently defined for the parent window and uses that for the children. But what if that font is different? Well it may not scale 'just right'. It will be close. You then need to make each control on each window just a bit bigger.

      The font that always drove me bonkers was this 2-6pt font my boss found somewhere. It was the font that broke the most things. Overlapping controls was the biggest problem. Especialy with radio button text and static controls.

      XP is probably the first windows that takes some of what the original poster was bitching about. It lets you scale most things. However I would be willing to bet most third party windows do not take these sorts of things into account. You will not see it with things like a web browser or word. Its usually more seen in the windows that popup and have 100 controls on them (yuck!). Like right now I am using XP. Most people bitch about how much real estate that title bar takes up. But you can change the size in the control panel. It also lets you make your desktop icons bigger. I tried this a few months ago. It has made hitting icons MUCH easier when the are bigger.

      Higher res's are nothing to be really scared of. Things just need to scale a bit. You can not basicly end up with a 2pt font and use it. Even though it is readable if you lean in real close. Its all a mater of scale.

      Oh you wanted some examples. Pick just about ANY RTS game. Change the res and suddely you have more playing field with microscopic fonts. I think all the C&C's have done this. Also Dungeon Siege does this.

    13. Re:Change the font size! by ptr2void · · Score: 1

      "point" is a resolution-independant unit, which should appear identical regardless of 1600x1200, 800x600 or 320x120. You're fixing the wrong side of the problem. Set up your dpi correctly instead.

    14. Re:Change the font size! by josh+crawley · · Score: 2, Informative

      It does suck that Windows doesn't allow any more fine-grained control than Small, Large or Extra Large fonts. You should just be able to tell it the size of your monitor and have fonts displayed at the *correct* size, dammit.

      Umm, that's exactly what it does. If you have a .inf file for your specific monitor, Windows is aware of the physical size and calculates the DPI accordingly. If you don't have a specific INF or you feel its calculation is wrong, You can go into Display Properties>Settings>Advanced and set the DPI settings to Custom, at which point a ruler is displayed onscreen which you can compare to a physical ruler, and adjust until they're equal. At this point, a 10 pt font is the exact same size on any properly calibrated monitor. The Small Large or Extra Large settings are just shortcuts that bump up the size of all UI widgets to a certain setpoint; you can just as easily get into the advanced Appearance settings and set your Icon Captions to be 72 points, if that's what floats your boat.

      HTH

    15. Re:Change the font size! by jherekc · · Score: 1

      FYI, if you check the Advanced Display Settings in Windows, you'll find a DPI setting

      --
      "lack of quality control is one of the pillars of slashdot"
    16. Re:Change the font size! by josh+crawley · · Score: 2, Informative

      XP is probably the first windows that takes some of what the original poster was bitching about. It lets you scale most things. However I would be willing to bet most third party windows do not take these sorts of things into account.

      Nope, it's been there since Win95. Also, the vast majority of professional apps developed in say the past 8 years, base measurements on the System Properties. You usually see problems with some app developed as "my first VB project" by some guy in Bum-Fucked Eastern Siberia or something.

    17. Re:Change the font size! by gerbache · · Score: 1

      My experience has been that most games do this. I can remember pushing the resolutions way up on Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament (and UT 2003) and having my fonts suddenly reduced to being so small you couldn't read anything. Granted, in those particular games, you didn't really need to read the text, but it still illustrates the point that computers haven't quite caught on to the concept of high resolutions yet. Until now, the biggest advantage of high resolutions has been to increase the amount of useable space, but now with 1600x1200 and larger displays being easily available, it seems to me that the next big push in display resolution needs to be in making everything that appears on the screen prettier rather than giving more space. Sure, some people might -need- more space on the desktop than even the current high resolutions can provide, but most of us will be fine with what can be done already. A good example for me is the current batch of super high resolution 15 inch laptop screens. I'm only in my 20s, but I still have some trouble reading text on a 1600x1200 screen that's only 15 inches. On a 17 inch or larger LCD, I don't have a problem with this, but on those small ones, things get a bit tiny for me. We're already starting to move in the right direction with this, as evidenced by both OS X and Windows XP's ability to scale up the sizes of everything with the resolution, but we aren't there until they can make all the programs get along to the point that it's readable. Oh but when we do, font rendering and the like has the potential to look absolutely incredible. OS X is most of the way there for me in font rendering, at least with font smoothing turned on. Windows XP might be getting there with Cleartype, but I only have a CRT on my XP machine, so I haven't seen it in full swing yet.

    18. Re:Change the font size! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the tip. But I'm sure that Windows (or Win2k at least) does not adjust dialogue boxes to the screen resolution. When you increase the screen resolution from say 1024x768 to 1600x1200, all the dialogue boxes and icons on the screen get smaller; when you decrease the resolution, everything gets bigger. Messing with Small Fonts / Large Fonts is the only way to compensate.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    19. Re:Change the font size! by mooredav · · Score: 1

      It does suck that Windows doesn't allow any more fine-grained control than Small, Large or Extra Large fonts.

      Yeah, I wish that MS had "innovated" up an antialiased font for Win2000.

      Bleh.

    20. Re:Change the font size! by josh+crawley · · Score: 1

      Yes, dialog boxes are definitely a bitch. For instance, I'm at 1600x1200 and although I have my general UI stuff tweaked to satisfaction, all those control panels and IE dialog boxes are still tiny. My take on it is that I don't spend all day screwing around with dialog boxes, so as long as 90% of my UI experience is covered, I'll live.

    21. Re:Change the font size! by sootman · · Score: 1

      The poster's problem is specified in his post, idiot: "I have a very weak eye and I read text at 1024x768 on a 21" monitor, sitting 2 feet away."

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    22. Re:Change the font size! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1
      Uh-huh. And where does he mention icons? Does he use a window manager with graphical toolbars? Does he use icons for anything? Who knows - he didn't mention it his story.

      He does, however, mention reading several times. I suggest you try it sometime.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    23. Re:Change the font size! by Breakfast+Pants · · Score: 1

      He's not talking about changing the resolution, he's talking about changing the DPI. Therefore, small / large fonts are not the only way to compensate, they are a shortcut to compensating.

      --

      --

      WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
    24. Re:Change the font size! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      What I mean is that no matter what DPI settings you give to Windows, it still seems to display dialogue boxes at a fixed _pixel_ size.

      Anyone can make a box that lets you type in a number of dots per inch - whether the GUI uses that number to adjust the display intelligently is what matters.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    25. Re:Change the font size! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Games generally contain their own font renderers and have nothing to do with Windows fontscaling.

    26. Re:Change the font size! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Indeed -- Mozilla has "runoff" text in the *default install* on Mac OS X. Bleck.

    27. Re:Change the font size! by Piquan · · Score: 1

      I don't know how well GNOME and KDE handle this, but there is a way to tell the X server your real display resolution.

      KDE handles it well. The most notable change is the fonts; the icons tend to be the same.

    28. Re:Change the font size! by len_harms · · Score: 1

      Oh I do not dispute that some of it has been there since 95. In fact that was what drove me bonkers about it. It almost worked, but wasnt quite there. I just feel that they took a decent step forward with XP. Like the Large Font switch. It just goooooooofed everything up. It just made things bigger but the font seemed to stay about the same.

      The thing is some 'pro' apps do not even take it into account. But that is because they sometimes feel they need the latest and greatest control. So they make a custom one that doesnt quite work right. Or if you change your font the whole window goes bezerk and things are overlapping all over the place. I just stick to MS San Serif. Its not the best font. But at least the overlapping controls dont bug me. After doing it for 3 years I can usually spot a control that is 1 du off and it bugs me :)

      Also some 'pro' apps feel they are better than everyone else and do not even care if the controls overlapp in some conditions. They take the attitude of 'use it the way we say, not the way you want'. I work on a project like that now. I gave up yelling at them. They started to think I was off my rocker.

    29. Re:Change the font size! by ameoba · · Score: 2

      It's bad enough that web designers are specifying things like this. It's not just crap sites, but 'serious' commercial sites that use small-ass fonts that don't respond to IE's 'Text Size' modifications. I'm not sure who to blame more... MSFT, for not letting IE work, or the webmonkies who are convinced that their page must look EXACTLY like they want it to.

      --
      my sig's at the bottom of the page.
    30. Re:Change the font size! by len_harms · · Score: 0

      Right now I am using a laptop to type this in. That cleartype SEEMED like a good idea. Instead it made everything super blury. I found myself squinting at it all the time, and giving myself headaches. Turned it off and headaches went away. At a higher res like 1600x1200 it may be better. But my laptop only does 1024x768 :(

      And on a CRT cleartype doesnt even work. The OS will just turn it off. On the Mac does it leave it on? Or do all macs come with lcd these days? Havent touched a mac for about 10 years. Windows does have the 'standard' font smoothing. But thats just aliasing which to me also looks blury and makes me squint.

      For a decent way of how it works see this grc. Hes a bit opinionated about it but gives a decent explination of it.

      However the real issue is that fonts have not scaled correctly with windows. Point sizes are based on a 72dpi. However just at the res I run at its more like 120 dpi. So a 8pt font will end up being about half as big as it should be. Meaning to get the size I am currently using I should be using a 4pt font. Instead fonts have been scaling along with the monitor size. At 640x480 it was about 1 to 1. But at 1600x1200 its now about 4 to 1. That is the real issue. Its a misuse of what point size was meant to be. But this has been sort of a short cut for them. You can now get twice as many windows on the screen with the same font size. So that way the guy who just bought the fancy new monitor can actually use the extra screen he just bought. If they were being rendered the way point sizes were meant to be used my 1024x768 would look like a 640x480 screen at the font size I am using.

      Printers have been scalling like crazy. Some claim to have like 1200dpi. Which means if you printed fonts the same way as windows, the fonts would be unreadble smudges due to smearing.

    31. Re:Change the font size! by Dahan · · Score: 1
      Mozilla. The preferences dialog ... does not adjust its default size to its contents.

      It doesn't? Works For Me; Mozilla 1.4, Windows XP. Preferences dialog at 96 dpi and 133 dpi.

    32. Re:Change the font size! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Enter. Do you know where it is on your keyboard and how to use it?

      Fucking retard...

    33. Re:Change the font size! by Sunnan · · Score: 1

      How about both? I'm really grateful for mozilla's text size modification, but that doesn't mean I should be happy with people who use the font-size CSS-element, or size attribute to the font tag. Default font size at all times, that's my motto.

    34. Re:Change the font size! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It'll be great when everything uses SVG icons which are rendered at the size you choose and at the right resolution for the display, but that day is a way off yet.

      Actually, it's going to be in the next release of KDE, 3.2.

    35. Re:Change the font size! by dublin · · Score: 1

      It'll be great when everything uses SVG icons which are rendered at the size you choose and at the right resolution for the display, but that day is a way off yet.

      That'll be about the Twelfth of Never. SVG would be great, but it has gained exactly zero traction. The only browser with native support is Amaya, which is not a browser but a dancing bear technology demo. IE requires the ghastly Adobe SVG plug-in, and the MOzilla SVG project is hopelessly moribund. Sadly, SVG is DEAD for now, and will remain that way until it is supported by a major browser, and may remain ded forever if MS doesn't support it in IEng, as seems likely...

      --
      "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last ./ post
    36. Re:Change the font size! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      I'm not talking about the browser, I'm talking about ordinary desktop icons and window decorations. Another poster mentioned that this will be implemented in KDE 3.2. GNOME 2.2 already has an SVG icon renderer.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    37. Re:Change the font size! by sootman · · Score: 1

      And where does he mention icons?

      Um, right here? "LCDs have fixed resolution and they are simply too small for me to read icons and widget text..."

      And you complain about *me* not reading? Glass houses, stones, etc etc...

      There are some grammatical problems in his post (you don't "read" icons, but if he meant "icon's text" or "icons' text" then he's missing an appostrophe) but I think I can discern his intentions: since he specifically complains about "widget text" (you know what a widget is, right?) I can only assume he uses a GUI with "graphical toolbars," unless he has trouble seeing the "^X" next to "Exit" in Pine. I further assume that, in addition to reading, he has trouble identifying and accurately clicking on the buttons in a toolbar--I didn't see him say "I have a bad eye and trouble seeing small text, but I have *excellent* hand-eye coordination and can easily click on an 8x8pixel button." Given his stated bad vision and stated difficulty with text being to small, I think it's safe to say he has trouble with the pretty much everything Graphical in a Graphical user Interface.

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  3. Even windows can change font sizes by PepsiProgrammer · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Just change your font sizes, problem solved, every wm imaginable lets you do that.

    Besides, old ladies buy CRT's... they just run them at 800x600 anyway (Looks like shit)

    --
    "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
    1. Re:Even windows can change font sizes by PepsiProgrammer · · Score: 1

      Oops, that should read "Even old ladies buy LCD's" I work for an wisp, and we were doing an install at an old ladies house... She had a 2.4ghz p4, 512mb of ram, a 64meg geforce4 with digital out, and a 600$ lcd with digital in.. She had the lcd on the analog out, running at 800x600 (looked horrible) and played crossword puzzles on it

      --
      "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
    2. Re:Even windows can change font sizes by Big+Sean+O · · Score: 1, Funny

      This is where you tell her you have to take it into the shop for 'repairs'.

      While it's in the shop, you swap out her motherboard for a piece of crap P2.

      Or, alternately, install "folding at home" on her computer so it does some useful work.

      --
      My father is a blogger.
    3. Re:Even windows can change font sizes by Microlith · · Score: 1

      Yes, but what about the rest of the UI.

      If you hadn't noticed, at least on windows the widgets deform horribly when the fontsize is increased.

      And some widgets don't handle resizing well and thus deform the UI to the point of being unusable.

    4. Re:Even windows can change font sizes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      your username is funny ;)

    5. Re:Even windows can change font sizes by SB5 · · Score: 1
      Oops, that should read "Even old ladies buy LCD's" I work for an wisp, and we were doing an install at an old ladies house... She had a 2.4ghz p4, 512mb of ram, a 64meg geforce4 with digital out, and a 600$ lcd with digital in.. She had the lcd on the analog out, running at 800x600 (looked horrible) and played crossword puzzles on it


      With that kind of set up, I think she does more than just crossword puzzles... She's probably got 25,000 kills in CS...
      --
      If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
      it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
    6. Re:Even windows can change font sizes by randyest · · Score: 1

      Perhaps the other posters weren't clear enough -- you can change widget size too. See Display Properties -> Appearance (where you can set Font Size to Normal, Large, or Extra Large) then click the Advanced button. From there you can independently set the size, color, and font (as each applies, of course) of: 3D objects, Active Tittle Bar, 3D Window Border, Application Background, Caption Buttons, Desktop, Icon, Icon Spacing (Horizontal), Icon Spacing (Vertical), Inactive Title Bar, Inactive Window Border, Menu, Message Box, Palette Title, Scrollbar, Selected Items, ToolTip, and Window. The interface is kind of annoying in that you have to select each of these from a drop-down one after the other, then change, then apply to see the differences. But it works. And I've never seen anything like this kind of control in CDE, KDE, or Gnome.

      These options, along with the Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> General -> DPI Settings -> Custom Settings mentioned by the awesome FP can be combined to make the windows (XP at least) display and scale any way you want it to.

      I know of these somewhat-hidden options only because I was recently trying to get my XP-based HTPC to be usable for more than playing movies and music using a presentation remote and a 27" TV 12' away. It worked out perfectly -- I can browse the web, configure the OS, whatever, and everything looks fine, is scaled right, and is rather huge.

      The only thing I could ask for that I don't (yet) have a way to do is to make the desktop (a virtual desktop) be huge, like 1600x1200, but only display 1/4 of it at a time (800x600) and be able to scroll around it so I can have a big browser window open covering the whole desktop area, and be able to read everything in each quadrant by scrolling around. I dowenloded a few virtual desktop managers, but the ones I found could be used to make mutiple desktops, but not one big one (i.e., I could not open a browser window and make it cover the whole area of the virtual desktop and scroll around it, I could only open browsers on each of the panes of the virtual dekstop, which is not what I want). Anyone know of a freeware tool that can do this?

      --
      everything in moderation
  4. Just do what grandma does... by greg987123 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Use a magnifying glass! ;)

    1. Re:Just do what grandma does... by stefanjo · · Score: 1

      I work at a customer support center for an ISP in sweden (and Europe) and once actually had a customer telling me to wait so he could get his magnifying glass :)

    2. Re:Just do what grandma does... by Jardine · · Score: 1

      Windows includes this as an accessibility tool. It takes over a portion at the top of the screen and shows a zoomed-in view of where your mouse pointer is.

  5. Buy a magnifier. by janda · · Score: 4, Informative

    They make full-screen monitor magnifiers for people with vision problems. Take a look here for starters.

    --
    Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
    1. Re:Buy a magnifier. by rhizome · · Score: 1

      Or how about an LCD Projector, like you see in conference rooms?

      --
      When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
    2. Re:Buy a magnifier. by AlphaHelix · · Score: 2

      Wow. I should get myself one of these, and a little bitty CRT, and it will be just like the movie Brazil!

      --
      * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
      * daring code hacker by night *
      http://www.silent-tristero.com
    3. Re:Buy a magnifier. by AaronStJ · · Score: 4, Insightful
      They make full-screen monitor magnifiers for people with vision problems.

      This isn't the point. I've used those magnifiers before (although my vision is good), and they make the whole screen look distorted. But that's not the point, either. The point is we have more and more screen real estate, and a lot of times in the desktop realm, it basically goes to waste. It used to be we needed thos extra pixels to fit more information on the screen. But I think we've hit the point that we doesn't need much more information to fit on the screen. And now instead of things getting smoother and smoother (like in a full-screen 3d game) things just get smaller and smaller. Sure, you can fit more 'stuff' it on the screen, but I'd bet at least 50% of computer users (even those without vision problems) dislike the teeny-tiny text and widgets that comes with an uber-large resolution, and would instead prefer a smoother dsiplay. I know I would

      There are several problems I've noticed that will have to adressed to deal with huge resolutions. I don't think fixing these problem would make or break Linux, but it would make a nive bullet point. There a problems like the teeny-tiny text I've mentioned, and tiny icons, but that can be easily fixed. The biggest problems are on the brower front. If you have your resolution jacked up terribly high, rather than getting a smoother-looking website, you usually get a tiny little strip on the left side of your browser. This is largely due to the fact that most website layouts are largely depended on fixed-size raster images (despite the intent of HTML). But even the most popular vector formant, Flash, just stays in a tiny little fixed-size box on the web page, despite your resolution. And what sense does that make? If you visit homestarrunner.com with a huge resolution, you end up with a talking postage stamp, even though it is a vector-based postage stamp, and therefore inherently infinitely scalable without loss of clarity! What is needed is less of a reliance of pixel graphics, and more of a reliace on vector formats, coupled with a browser that can scale the whole page at once, not just the text.

      On the operating system front, we need scalable widgets, scalable icons, and easily changed font default font sizes. I know you can change the dpi of your monitor in Windows, but how many average users want to wander into a section marked 'Advanced Settings'?

      Face it, this is and issue, and it does need to be adressed.
      --
      Stupid like a fox!
    4. Re:Buy a magnifier. by Jellybob · · Score: 1

      Eeeek! NOOOO!

      Have you tried using those things for anything other than presentations and watching movies? It's horrible.

      Or maybe that's just the one we have at work, which I actually have to use for real stuff every now and then when I'm setting up the interactive whiteboard.

    5. Re:Buy a magnifier. by zephc · · Score: 1

      i run at 1920x1080 on a 17" CRT (so my display is letterboxed :P) and I'm used to it now, but i do sometimes use command-option-[plus] or -[minus] to zoom in and out (OS X). I could totally use one of these things. I don't get eye strain tho because I tend to look away to the TV from time to time.

      --
      "I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
    6. Re:Buy a magnifier. by jetmarc · · Score: 1

      > you usually get a tiny little strip on the left side of your browser

      Opera is able to scale the display of a web page, text and images and flash. Since
      a few minor revisions, it even inherits the zoom factor when you open links in new
      windows (a thing that I often do when google-ing).

      Use the + and - keys on the numeric keypad, if you happen to have Opera installed.
      It's not perfect, but it's far better than the zoom support I've seen in Netscape.

      Marc

    7. Re:Buy a magnifier. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      But I think we've hit the point that we doesn't need much more information to fit on the screen.

      Don't do much graphics work do you?

    8. Re:Buy a magnifier. by macmurph · · Score: 1

      I found a way to map the zooming feature you describe to my mouse scroll wheel. When I press down and scroll it zooms in for more detail. So far its only worked for me with Microsoft optical mice, but others may discover a workaround.

      As a side note about this story...Its funny that this guy is asking for a resolution independent operating system...when one already exists. OS X rocks!

      http://osxfaq.com/tips/murphy/index.ws

      Universal Access Zoom Scroll Wheel Trick in Jaguar.

      OSXFAQ Reader Tip By Chris Murphy

      I set my scroll wheel to automatically trigger the Universal Access zoom in and out feature.

      I use a Microsoft Intellimouse. In the Microsoft Mouse panel I set the "Press and Roll Forward" to Keystroke Command-Option + and the "Press and Roll Backward" to keystroke Command-Option -

      Then I turned on zooming in the Universal Access Panel.

      When I press and roll forward on the scroll wheel, it zooms in on the part of the screen I want to study. It works so well, I use it every few minutes to study images on the web or get a closer look at small text.

      For those that dont have a Microsoft Mouse, this will probably work in USB overdrive.

      Also, I made one exception for Photoshop so that instead of using the Universal Access Zoom, it uses the Photoshop zoom. The shortcuts are Command + and Command - in that case.

      Enjoy :-)

    9. Re:Buy a magnifier. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I went and looked at their site, and I have one request for these monitor magnifier people -- could they PLEASE MAGNIFY THE PRODUCT PHOTOS? 76 pixels wide by 57 pixels high is really not enough to depict a product. Especially a product geared towards people who want (or even need) the images on their screen to be bigger!

      'Course, maybe these people aren't trying to sell screen magnifiers at all, and instead they just really like irony a whole lot.

    10. Re:Buy a magnifier. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      They make full-screen monitor magnifiers for people with vision problems.

      Yes, they're called glasses. I had this same problem. I'd get horrible eye strain even trying to read the text on my 21" monitor. Reading a whiteboard or a chalkboard more than 10 feet away was completely out of the question since it was all blurry. I found out that you can go to an optometrist and they actually test your eyes and they can fit you with a pair of glass (mine are plastic) lenses that adjust the light coming into your eyes so it isn't distorted. Really a revolutionary idea.

    11. Re:Buy a magnifier. by Firehawke · · Score: 1

      A friend and I borrowed one for a few days and had the opportunity to try PC and console gaming on it. It wasn't bad at all. Almost zero flicker, but it was a REALLY expensive model. With projectors, you get what you pay for.

      Eventually I plan on picking one up..

    12. Re:Buy a magnifier. by Lord+Kestrel · · Score: 1

      I run my 21" at 1600x1200, and wish it could do 1920x1440 like my old one could. I prefer small text, as it lets me put quite a bit onto the screen. I rarely find a problem with a website that doesn't scale with my browser window size, but I keep Javascript disabled, so perhaps that has something to do with it.

      The area I find problems with, is Windows-based applications that don't allow resizing of their windows. There is nothing more annoying than running an application that is 300x300 pixels, and has a scrollbar to read the text, instead of allowing one to resize the window to display the entirety of the text.

  6. Quartz by Microlith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Being based on OpenGL, PDF, and making extensive use of TrueType fonts, I was under the impression that Quartz and MacOS X were aptly suited for this sort of use.

    IIRC, essentially the entire UI is vector graphics (being done by OpenGL and all), so Apple might have this covered.

    Indeed, a 200ppi display would be nice, but not at 21" or smaller sizes.

    1. Re:Quartz by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Informative
      Being based on OpenGL, PDF, and making extensive use of TrueType fonts, I was under the impression that Quartz and MacOS X were aptly suited for this sort of use.

      Every OS makes use of TrueType fonts.

      IIRC, essentially the entire UI is vector graphics (being done by OpenGL and all), so Apple might have this covered.

      You do not recall correctly. The Aqua gui is entirely pixmap based, the widgets aren't even scalable (which has caused the safari team some grief).

    2. Re:Quartz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IIRC, essentially the entire UI is vector graphics (being done by OpenGL and all), so Apple might have this covered.

      Quartz is not based on OpenGL. The latest version of Quartz uses some 3D hardware acceleration to try to speed it up a little, but it's still pretty slow compared to Windows and X11.

    3. Re:Quartz by JudgeFurious · · Score: 1

      It is well suited for this kind of thing. I love the way everything looks on my older 21" Studio Display at 1600x1200 but obviously we are talking about some very small text which has gotten harder for me to read as I've gotten closer to 40. I have never had really good vision to begin with but in OSX it's no problem to crank the fonts up to a size that's perfectly readable by me and it still looks great. Smooth and clear and big enough to read.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
    4. Re:Quartz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do not recall correctly. The Aqua gui is entirely pixmap based, the widgets aren't even scalable (which has caused the safari team some grief).

      Lie #1 of the day!

      Let's hear some more whoppers from 'RealMike' and his repetoire of anti-Mac FUD!

    5. Re:Quartz by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 1

      You're saying they are? Last time I checked, which was perhaps a few months ago now, they were not scalable and entirely pixmap based. AFAIK no major update has come out since then.

    6. Re:Quartz by jc42 · · Score: 1

      So how do you make it work? I'm typing this on a new Powerbook with OSX, and I have sorta figured out how to change the font sizes (though they don't always seem to stay changed). But this applies only to text.
      The writer was asking about such things as menus, images, etc. Nothing I do changes any of these at all.

      Actually, I have the opposite problem: People are always complaining about the tiny fonts that I use. This is because I try to use the smallest font that I can read, so I can get more info on the screen. On a laptop, there's less screen space, but I'm even closer, so I can use 9- and 10-point fonts.

      But there's still a lot of screen space taken up by the menu bar, and all the things that apps like to string across the top of their window. This is wasted space that could be radically condensed and I'd still be able to read it. But there don't seem to be any controls for this.

      On my linux box, I do things like turn off the title bars in most apps, tell KDE to use tiny icons, and so on. Other people can do turn off the title bars but use large fonts and icons. But with OSX, it seems to be one size fits all for menus, titles, icons, etc. Only the font in the "content" window can be configured.

      I could well be wrong, of course. If so, where is it documented?

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    7. Re:Quartz by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 2, Funny

      Every OS makes use of TrueType fonts.

      Damn! CP/M sure looks sweet with those true-type fonts!

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    8. Re:Quartz by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Yep, it's true, buttons don't scale. But all it takes is to make MacOSX user to confess the real fact. Well, that's impossible for that kind of humanity.

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    9. Re:Quartz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      But there's still a lot of screen space taken up by the menu bar, and all the things that apps like to string across the top of their window. This is wasted space that could be radically condensed and I'd still be able to read it. But there don't seem to be any controls for this.
      I don't remember what its called, but the oblong button in the upper right corner of the windows on Mac OS X will (for applications that have it) reduce the space used by the toolbar. And on Camino, try cmd-clicking the button.
    10. Re:Quartz by sorbits · · Score: 1

      Each window is drawn entirely with the cpu in main memory and uploaded as a texture -- then OpenGL is used to blend these textures.

  7. Change Your Windows DPI setting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Windows supports a crude form of scaling -- go to the advanced display setting and change the DPI setting.

    This isn't a "Window Manager" issue, but something that has to be handled in X11 itself, which as everyone knows is old and crusty and unlikely to develop any feature until a decade after commercial OSes have it. Good luck.

    1. Re:Change Your Windows DPI setting by Alan+Cox · · Score: 1

      For Red Hat at least just go into Preferences->Fonts and set the DPI to something different and your font sizes will adjust. Another useful tip is that most displays (even the junkier ones) will display very well at doubles of their optimal resolution - so a 1280x1024 panel is very happy at 640x512. Shifting the DPI normally gives better results.

      Sun also provided a desktop theme for Gnome designed for optimal accessibility by users with sight problems

  8. waimea by B1ackDragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    www.waimea.org

    Waimea is a very customizable window manager, I suggest checking it out. It's a little tricky to get "just right" but that is the downfall of anything customizable.

    Of course, as an earlier post stated, almost any decent windowmanager should be able to do this. I use fluxbox, theres Windowmaker, and I'm sure KDE and GNOME have font size features as well.

    --
    The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
    1. Re:waimea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seems to be roadkill - author went on vacation last year and never came back.

      For the Hawaiian-impaired, Waimea is pronounced something like "why-may-ah" stress on the "why."

  9. Phasing Out? by cephalien · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I suffer from much the same problem. I actually own a 15" LCD, but never use it because things are generally much too small, and increasing font size (or what have you) simply take up so much of the screen estate that it does become fairly unusable. However, I too have a 21" monitor that I've set up to run things more comfortably, and I find it much superior.

    As for CRTs totally phasing out, I can't imagine that happening any time in the near future, especially since the cost of an equivalent LCD panel ends up being approximately double (at least in my researches). Until that price goes down, phasing out of CRTs is rather unlikely.. not to mention that there will probably always be some sort of a market for the CRT, if not for those of us who have rather poor eyesight.

    --
    If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
    1. Re:Phasing Out? by Phosphor3k · · Score: 3, Informative

      I know local conputer shops that have already phased out CRTs because the shipping is so much cheaper that it balances out. They also save much needed floorspace in their inventories.

    2. Re:Phasing Out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was at Best Buy yesterday and they had 4 CRT's and 13 LCD's on display.

    3. Re:Phasing Out? by digital+bath · · Score: 1

      I find it a little hard to believe that a 19 inch LCD screen (which can cost around $400) and a 19 inch crt (which can cost around $250 to %300) is cheaper after shipping.

      --
      find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
    4. Re:Phasing Out? by Xzzy · · Score: 1

      Not to flame (too much :) but this is a seriously flawed argument to make.

      Stating that LCD's are inferior because you don't have enough room on a 15", and CRT's are much better because you do have enough room on a 21"? I challenge you to find enough room for large fonts on a 15" CRT.. you'd be saying the exact same complaint.

      Not neccessarily defending LCD's here (or CRT's) but if you're going to compare the two, you should at least offer them the dignity of testing against equal feature sets.

    5. Re:Phasing Out? by JebusTheImpaler · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I used to do research for a major computer company, and we were studying the image quality of LCDs vs. CRTs. We found (mind you this was two years ago) that CRTs are substantially better. There are various reasons for this, mostly because of the color properties of LCDs. Either way, I doubt that LCDs have caught up, or surpassed the image quality of a good CRT display.

      Thus, if there is still a market for high quality displays, I doubt CRTs will be phased out anytime soon.

    6. Re:Phasing Out? by Natalie's+Hot+Grits · · Score: 1

      Thats not the point. After shipping, the margins are shot. It doesn't matter that a CRT is still cheaper after shipping. Larger outfits can afford this because they get free shipping from their distributers. But average sized computer shops just can't compete locally in price if they have to pay for CRT shipping charges. Selling CRT's at a price that is not locally competative is like committing suicide.

      If you can ship a 19" LCD for practically nothing, and a 19" CRT for a significant price, you can sell the LCD for a significantly smaller margin and still make the same percentage profit. And since LCD's now have over 50% of the monitor retail market, there is almost no reason to carry CRT's in stock unless your a huge retail store. Small stores just don't have enough customers to carry both types. (where I work, we will special order them for people)

      On top of all this, its relatively EASY to sell an LCD monitor, and relatively hard to sell a CRT. After the power savings and clearer fonts, people with bad eyesite and/or environmental concerns, and electric bill concerns, will almost always pay the extra money upfront just in those benefits alone. Not to mention they take up negligable amounts of desk space, can pivot their aspect ratio, and other neat features.

      The only people who should need a CRT are people playing video games. Because the fastest LCD's around are around 15ms which means max refresh of ~65Hz. More commonly, most LCD's are more like 25ms which is equivilent to 40Hz which produces a huge problem with ghosting effects while moving in a 3D world.

      --
      Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
    7. Re:Phasing Out? by Natalie's+Hot+Grits · · Score: 1

      This is not a flawed argument at all. Currently, a 21" CRT is about the same price at a retail store as a 15-17" LCD pannel. Now there are quality differences in cheap CRT's and expensive ones, and the same goes for LCD's, but comparing them on featureset alone is certaintly the wrong approach.

      If you are looking for the best quality/features for an upfront budget, then certaintly CRT is the way to go. But if you are looking for the overall best no matter of upfront price, then yes, you could compare a 15" LCD to a 15" CRT. The more common comparison tho has the most significant portion being price/performance.

      --
      Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
    8. Re:Phasing Out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At least with larger stores, it's not so much the shipping, but the storage and display space. They would end up filling a large amount of space with low profit monitors, when they could be using that space to sell high-profit laptops or printer cables.

    9. Re:Phasing Out? by Firehawke · · Score: 1

      I don't know about that. When I've passed by Best Buy or any local computer shop in the past year or thereabouts, I've rarely seen LCDs being purchased. It's pretty much always CRTs because of the price and lifetime concerns.

      Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's what I've seen.

    10. Re:Phasing Out? by Natalie's+Hot+Grits · · Score: 1

      "When I've passed by Best Buy or any local computer shop in the past year or thereabouts, I've rarely seen LCDs being purchased."

      The people in your town might not be buying them then. Because everywhere else, they are selling like hotcakes. In the computer shop I work at, we sell exclusively LCD pannels because BestBuy undercuts us on the CRT's and nobody will pay our price for them. And these LCD's sell pretty fast too. And according to news.com:

      During May, flat-panel unit sales at retail in the United States passed those of CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors for the first time, according to the NPD Group. In addition, sales of larger 17-inch and 19-inch displays are expected to increase, displacing 15-inch displays over time. In May, sales of 17-inch units were three times higher than in the same month last year, according to NPD Group data.

      So yes, they are still selling more CRT's when it comes to number of units shipped. But even that statistic will soon be surpassed by LCD's by years end according to articles I have been reading.

      --
      Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
  10. What you want is an SVG UI by Bistronaut · · Score: 4, Informative

    ..and people are working on it. Seek KDE and I found this project on Sourceforge. I assume that you already turn on "large fonts" in Windows. Windows can theoretcally support font sizes that are larger, but the problem is that most applications aren't designed with varying font sizes in mind. Some applications already look messed up with the dpi setting that "large fonts" uses. It's a matter of poor UI design. People use fixed-size images in their programs and expect them to line up.

    1. Re:What you want is an SVG UI by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Well, I think GNOME can use SVG graphics pretty much throughout the desktop these days, although SVG icons tend to look bad at low resolutions so not many people use it.

      Having said that widget toolkits with containment based layouts like GTK and Qt are much better for this sort of thing. Traditional Win32 widgets/windows have no concept of geometry management, meaning that they are hard to make resizable and don't deal well with text changing their size as can happen with odd font sizes and internationalized text.

      I would guess this is what puts Linux at a large advantage over Windows here, rather than any part of the window manager (which has no effect on font size, I would note).

    2. Re:What you want is an SVG UI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Eh?

      I use Windows, and I use Linux, and I find that Windows with large fonts (and consequently shitty spacing, windows where half the controls are cut off, and the like) still looks better than the average Linux app. Maybe when Linux gets some UI designers who know how to produce something elegant, robust, and consistent, I'll drop the Windows side of my life.

    3. Re:What you want is an SVG UI by james72 · · Score: 1

      Poor UI design, or poor OS support for different fonts? On the Amiga, the cool thing to do was make sure that your UI was 'font-sensitive'. I wrote an email client that looked beautiful in all res/fonts. I miss that on Windows. -James.

    4. Re:What you want is an SVG UI by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Recently, I did some minor work on a dealer portal for a big-name Japanese auto manufacturer. They hard-wired all their HTML specifications such that if anybody ever tried to scale the fonts or anything up or down, it would be a huge mess. They also assumed that everyone would have a decent-sized monitor. If they ever need or want to use it on smaller portable devices, Tablets, PDA's, etc., they are hosed.

      The whole thing was rather stupid and wasteful IMO. The money they are spending to lock themselves into a tight corner is huge. I could probably have done the project myself for about 1/50'th their cost if they didn't stick all kinds of silly, limiting constraints in it. It is amazing the money big companies will waste out of bullheadedness. Oh well, it creates jobs I guess.

      They might as well make one big GIF map for each page rather than pay people to torture HTML with tweazers and microscopes. I think their car engineering leaked into web design, because every pixel just about had a spot laid out for it on blue-print like sheets. They didn't "get" dynamic scaling in the least.

    5. Re: What you want is an SVG UI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, KDE has already taken steps to make large-resolution screens look nice. Although there were many complaints, the default font settings for KDE 3 were quite large for normal screens. Also, in KDE, you can change the widgets (e.g. select a different theme). The Mosfet Liquid widgets are fairly large, and I would not be suprised if someone came up with a theme just for large widgets. Using KDE, you can already get larger fonts and larger widgets (albeit not through a completely cohesive method).

  11. Larger LCDs with 1024x768 native by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have seen several Large (i.e. 21" - 29") LCDs that have a native resolution of 1024x768. Sure they are expensive now, but if the CRT is gone then the price is sure to come down.

  12. x-ray by Davak · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here at the hospital we use a high-resolution radiograph system. The text IN the system itself is fine; however, the OS text from win2k is extremely small.

    Luckily, all of these systems only have the imaging system and the OS installed... so the only program that ever runs is the radiograph system.

    Isn't this just a setting, however? I figured the admins were just idiots and didn't bump up the text size.

    Davak

    1. Re:x-ray by Ibn+al+Arabi · · Score: 0

      Yep, you can easily make the fonts in the OS bigger. Your admins are just lazy or idiots...

  13. Scaling by compwizrd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Assuming you don't want to screw around with font sizes.

    Get a 21" LCD that has a native resolution of 1600x1200.

    Run it at 800x600. This makes it map each pixel to 4 pixels(2 vertical, 2 horizontal), which will scale perfectly no matter what.

    Congrats, you now have a 21" 800x600 monitor.

    1. Re:Scaling by Ann+Coulter · · Score: 1

      Also, a 17" and 19" LCD has the same maximum resolution of 1280x1024. You can consider buying a 19" LCD to get a magnified version of what you would get with a 17" LCD.

    2. Re:Scaling by Homology · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Get a 21" LCD that has a native resolution of 1600x1200.

      I would love to have a 21" LCD monitor with very fast response time, that is also affordable. None around, so I've got to use CRT.

    3. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Congrats you make me feel sick. 21" at 800x600!!! fuck you wanker!

    4. Re:Scaling by Sgs-Cruz · · Score: 1

      What, like these ones? The ones that are like $1300 American each? Not exactly the most practical option, I'd say.

      --

      Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).

    5. Re:Scaling by Transcendent · · Score: 1

      Congrats, you now have a 21" 800x600 monitor.

      eeeewwwwwww.... what a waste.

    6. Re:Scaling by pla · · Score: 1

      The ones that are like $1300 American each? Not exactly the most practical option, I'd say.

      At the moment, no, not practical.

      However, the parent post mentioned that he felt concerned that in the future he would not have the ability to get a large CRT.

      10 years ago, 21" CRTs cost in that same range, around UDS $1000-$1500 for the entry level ones and going up steeply after that.

      Three years ago I picked up a pair of them for just under $300 (great deal at the time, though now you can regularly get them in the $300-$400 range).

      Don't know how I lived without it... The larger screen makes many tasks SO much easier, I can no longer stand to work for more than a few minutes on anything below 19" (like using a dialup after having a cablemodem for a few years). Of course, I also just set up my first "Real" dual monitor config... Once again, I don't know how I used to work with so much less screen area, I now look forward to exactly such cheap 21" LCDs as we dicsuss so I can tile an entire wall with them (or at the very least, 5 on-edge panels arranged around my desk in an arc). ;-).

      But (forgive my rambling), a similar trend will apply to LCDs. They will come down in price to a reasonable range in a few years, long before CRTs become a rarity.

    7. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have poor eyesight, why would you care about response time?

    8. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah, but that's what the article submitter wanted!

      he's doign 1024x768 at 21" now

    9. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, a 17" and 19" LCD has the same maximum resolution of 1280x1024

      WTF? I'm typing this on a 15" LCD with native resolution of 1400x1050. And the same resolution is available in a 14" LCD now too. Alternatively, you can get a 15" LCD in 1600x1200. I'm talking about IBM, by the way.

    10. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...but think, about 3 years ago, $1200 is what a decent (ViewSonic P810, for example) 21" CRT monitor cost.

      Computer equipment is definitely the one area where the longer you wait the better stuff gets (except for Windows).

      To think, I just put 1 GB of RAM in my computer a month ago for $250.

      And, now they have 250 GB IDE drives!

      It is absolutely insane for anyone with a sense of history and how far this stuff actually has come.

      Too bad cars haven't scaled the way computers have over the last 20 years, or perhaps I actually could buy a new 2003 Porsche Turbo for $18,000, instead of ~$100K (but, then what would all the dentists and lawyers be driving instead? Hmm...)

      C'est la vie.

    11. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Better stock up on CRTs then ;)

    12. Re:Scaling by dzogchen · · Score: 1

      Not a waste at all if you have bad vision.

    13. Re:Scaling by Miksa · · Score: 0

      But you are talking about a laptop. Seems like all the highest resolution displays go to laptop manufacturers. It has been comparatively hard to find desktop LCDs with similar resolutions.

      --

      Begging for modpoints since '03
    14. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The difference between 1024x768 and 800x600 is the difference between useable and unuseable in most all modern applications and websites..
      800x600 is simply too little screen real estate for practical purposes.

    15. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL, when you can apply Moore's law (which isn't about speed of computing as such, but size of transistors) to a car then you could expect that :)

      Besides, this is /. so shouldn't you go with the linux of cars, a big muscle wagon that you spend 3-4 hours a week keeping in shape? I'd have guessed the Porsche would be something like a shiny new powerbook.... :)

    16. Re:Scaling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the biggest problem with LCDs is not the resolution; they can go higher than some CRTs can. The problem is the refresh rate. LCDs have a tremendously slow refresh rate, making graphics-intense operations slower and choppier. Perhaps it's only slightly choppier, but it's noticable.

  14. What's the problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    On my Dell 2000FP LCD I'm getting a rock solid 1600x1200 and my smallest fonts are fully readable. I'm not sure I would find anything readable from 2 feet away. Maybe you should consider moving closer. In any case, you can run in non-native resolutions. They are less than ideal, but the result kinda reminds me of a magnifying glass effect applied to the entire screen which sounds exactly what you are looking for.

    1. Re:What's the problem? by opti6600 · · Score: 1

      I use a 2000FP as well. The beauty of high-end LCD panels like these is that their scaling hardware is a bit better than others, and you also have picture-in-picture.

      Overall folks, get the highest resolution, nicest LCD you can find, and run it at a even multiple of the resolution. i.e. 800x600 for a 1600x1200 display (2x2 pixels to one)

  15. Windows Fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    strange that the poster gets his anti-Ms feelings in, almost like he feels the /. crowd won't chip in with some anti-MS sentiment. :-)

    Windows - open up the control panel Display properties, change the 'text size' parameter to 'large'. Easy, simple, you get big fonts.

    Alternatively, change the text size in the Appearance settings for the display. Easy peasy.

    My big question though - if the poster had put 'how do I get big fonts on windows' as an article, would it have been rejected???

    Perhaps we can start to see other articles. 'Your rights online: RIAA blah blah blah blah. and they run Windoze servers'.

    'Youth spend more time on Web that TV. and what can we do to make them use Mozilla instead of internet exploder'

    'Geothermal activity on Mars. caused by Windows servers. perhaps this is something Linux can address and get people to move'

    'More ont he Tango Electric Car. that runs Linux. hahaa Windoze is dead'.

    1. Re:Windows Fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ahem... to the above re: poster, try -1 offtopic.

    2. Re:Windows Fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wasn't his real problem seeing the icons?

    3. Re:Windows Fonts by justsomebody · · Score: 1

      Windows - open up the control panel Display properties, change the 'text size' parameter to 'large'. Easy, simple, you get big fonts.

      Corrupts too many dialog boxes

      Alternatively, change the text size in the Appearance settings for the display. Easy peasy

      For what can you do that, let's see: Active caption, Inactive caption, Icon, Message box test

      Although you haven't mentioned Display Settings-Settings-Advanced, and setting DPI.

      Well that fact makes other concerns, sometimes some fonts don't get resized, and corrupts some other window sizes

      And you forgot to mention Cleartype

      Well most of apps is stil no antialiased

      maybe it's time for you to set your home button in web browser to www.microsoft.com

      --
      Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
    4. Re:Windows Fonts by jpop32 · · Score: 1

      Wasn't his real problem seeing the icons?

      In which case there is a convenient 'Use Large Icons' in 'Effects' tab of display properties.

      I run my desktop at 1280x1024 with large icons and large fonts. Works fine with a majority of programs, the exception being some ancient Win3.11 games/utils. You can set it up and forget about it, it's that simple.

      IMHO, this is just another case of "With my limited knowledge of Windows features, I guess it probably doesn't have/can't do this, ergo, it sucks". :-)

  16. It's a fence. by Martigan80 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    First of all great question! I'm glad to see such an issue brought up.

    Second this is indeed a way Linux could come ahead, but it can also alienate those people with these needs. I mean this in a sense if Linux would be the only OS to recognize the needs of people with poor vision and a certain job only uses Windows OSs where does that leave the user? Any how it is about time that computers are a little more friendly. Geeks and users come in all sizes and shapes with there own unique issues.

    And if you vote for me....

    --
    This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
  17. Maybe... by Zagar · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the perfect opportunity to invent some sort of magnifying device...Yes..it should be portable and light. I'll call it glasses.

    --
    YAFIRL (Yet another Free iPods referral link)
    1. Re:Maybe... by diffuze · · Score: 1

      I have to say that I find that remark quite offensive.
      I'm very near-sighted and have worn glasses since the age of three. I wear contacts at work (I do not work with computers) and I wear my glasses at home, especially in front of the computer, because the lenses make my eyes dry up. My glasses are those kind that people like to call "coca cola bottles". I have -14 Diopters on one eye and -21 on the other. The big difference between the eyes makes it impossible to fully compensate the lens/glasses strength for both eyes simultaniously.
      Believe me when I say I've had my share of being made fun of.
      Here is a good introduction regarding myopia (near-sightedness).

      Text size in the windowmanager or windows itself are fairly easy to get bigger. It is quite different when it comes to websites. I use small text on my own website, but with mozilla's minimum font setting that is no problem. As long as the site don't break up too much when increasing the font, all is ok.

    2. Re:Maybe... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, I find it offensive too!!

      I WEAR GLASSES!!
      BOO HOO!!!

      Oh, wait, this is slashdot. We all wear freaking thick black glasses. :P

    3. Re:Maybe... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Four-eyes!

    4. Re:Maybe... by brakk · · Score: 1

      First, I have to say IT WAS A JOKE! You shouldn't find it offensive unless it was directed at you or saying something bad about people that wear glasses in general.

      Second, I've worn glasses since the 3rd grade (contacts mostly now) and am very near-sited (can only see about 3 inches out without them). It's interesting to hear what it's like from someone that has even worse vision than I do. Have you looked into laser surgery? They are doing amazing things with it now and a lot of insurance companies will pay at least part of it especially if it's affecting your work.

    5. Re:Maybe... by diffuze · · Score: 1

      I have looked into lazer surgery a bit, but it's out of the question at the moment. I don't live in the US, so in order to get a surgery for my eyes, i'd have to do it abroad plus pay for it myself.
      My hope is in the future. =)

    6. Re:Maybe... by The+Breeze · · Score: 1

      Make sure you patent these "glasses".

      That way, you can go after all those evil infringers.

    7. Re:Maybe... by Ibn+al+Arabi · · Score: 0

      1. Call them 'Portable Windows'
      2. Microsoft sues you over the use of Windows
      3. Free publicity
      4. Profit :)

    8. Re:Maybe... by Smurf · · Score: 1

      Hummm... I don't see how "not living in the US" has much to do with your opportunities of getting reliable LASIK. It's not like other countries don't have the required technology. And, living in the US, I have concluded that the doctors here are not necessarily the best ones.

      As a matter of fact, both the original corrective corneal surgery and LASIK (laser-based) were invented in Colombia (yes, South America) by Drs José Barraquer and Luis Antonio Ruiz, respectively. And, in general, Barraquer's students have a practically spotless success rate for their refractive surgeries.

      I got LASIK nearly two years ago, performed by Luis Ruiz and couldn't be happier. Some doctors operate on many patients that travel from the US for their surgeries since the costs are much lower (even counting airline tickets and hotel fares).

      There was an interesting story on Slashdot about LASIK some months ago. You can also corroborate everything I'm telling you by doing a quick Google search.

      As another poster said, since your myopia is extremely high, maybe it will not be fully corrected by LASIK. But it's possible that it will improve your eyesight enough so that you can use more comfortable lenses or much thinner (and lighter) glasses, thus improving your quality of life.

      Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide!

    9. Re:Maybe... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You may wish to investigate lens replacement surgery. I just had it done (mild cataracts were the reason/excuse) and it was also able to largely correct for various other vision problems that were actually MORE bothersome than the cataracts.
      The results were wonderful.
      As with any eye surgery search HEAVILY for info and be a well-informed consumer.

  18. Legacy resolutions by Traa · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't worry to much about those high resolution displays yet. Modern LCD's support multiple resoltions too. The difference is that LCD's have a sweet spot (their native resolution) but they typically stretch or shrink to support the legacy resolutions that you wish to use.

  19. I know how you feel by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I run 2048x1536 and although I have my environment sorted out wrt menu text reading, the web is a bit of nightmare at times.

    Thank goodness for Mozillas Minimum font size so I can read the darn text but so many sites break if you change the fontsize. It's not like non IE users don't have enough to cope with.

    I'll be honest and say that sometimes it's quite difficult to code for as Mozilla's & IE differing rules regarding text resizing from their own menus.

    I wouldn't turn down my resolution though, 80 columns of 1.5cm high text is lovely for writing.

    Now if only I could make text-areas bigger I could see what I was typing to /.

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    1. Re:I know how you feel by toddestan · · Score: 4, Informative

      You should check out Opera's browser. It has a magnifying feature that can magnify any webpage from 20% to 1000%. Anytime I can't see what's going on, I just bump it up and I can see again. It works pretty smooth too, on graphics, text, even flash.

    2. Re:I know how you feel by xtrucial · · Score: 1

      Now if only I could make text-areas bigger I could see what I was typing to /.

      You can. Go to Preferences, Comments, then "Comment Box Size (Also applies to other large text boxes)".

    3. Re:I know how you feel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      If you're using windows, you might look into The Proxomitron, it was originally designed for blocking adverts, but has fairly powerful (if a little non-standard.....) regexp that makes modifying web pages quite easy (e.g. increasing the size of textareas).

      (For the ad-filtering side and as an example of what can be done with the software, this does quite a good job).

  20. Gnome with SVG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Use Gnome, and use one of the SVG icon themes, and set the font sizes to something large. you will still have the higher resolution, but everything should be larger and still good looking.

  21. MOD PARENT UP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's so fucking true!

    +1, Insightful

  22. Wrong focus by Faust7 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    not many people can read Microsoft's widget text on a 150dpi display, which may explain why no one buys them even that they are available.

    Or perhaps it's just because they're expensive, hmm?

  23. serious innovation here, people!!!@# by wheezy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Linux may have an edge up on The Competition by decoupling font size from display resolution! This is serious innova-- oh wait. Dear Slashdot Editors: just because it has the word "Linux" in it doesn't mean it's worth posting.

  24. Just wait for software to catch up. by DumbSwede · · Score: 1
    In the long run, OS's and Programs that allow you to easily zoom in and read small print will be the norm. Things are only occasionally hard to read now, because cheap hi-resolution displays are only now becoming common, and we have a lot of legacy software.

    Microsoft may not lead the pack in adaptation of easy to use, intuitive, screen zooming, integrated into the OS, but they will throw it in, in a heartbeat, when a competing OS does. Only with truly hi-resolution displays, do interactive 3-D OS environments make sense.

    1. Re:Just wait for software to catch up. by Haeleth · · Score: 1

      > Only with truly hi-resolution displays, do interactive 3-D OS environments make sense.

      That's begging quite a few questions. Like whether interactive 3D OS environments will ever make sense. Do you know anyone with a conceptually 3D working environment? I sure don't. 2D across the desk - taking drawers and piles as overlapping 2D objects - and then 2D up the bookshelf.

    2. Re:Just wait for software to catch up. by DumbSwede · · Score: 1
      When I suggest a 3D environment, I do not mean in a 3D game sense. Just various objects that you fix your attention on an bring them closer when you want to scrutinize them, very much like I do with my desk at work. The combined pixel count of all the documents strewn across it would be enormous, but I don't really see all that resolution, only portions of it when I pick up a folder or paper and examine it more closely.

      I have a 19 monitor at 1280x1040 res that I'm using to type this, and an 8 foot projection screen on the same computer capable of Quad-XGA (2048*1536). I had expected to use the projection screen as my main screen, but I don't. I find that I sit close to the 19 inch monitor and, when something is very small, or requires extra scrutiny, I lean in close, a sort of poor man's 3D maneuver to zoom in on an area of interest (don't get me wrong Quad-XGA is Awesome for games and movies). The huge surface of my 8 foot screen is great for navigating 3-D gaming environments, but sucks for 2D editing chores.

      I have seen early 3D OS experiments rendered at 1280x1040 or lower and they suck. It wasn't so much that the maneuvering of documents was clumsy and un-intuitive (which it was), but that the low resolution destroyed the ability to discern what a document was when you put it down on your simulated desk environment, or it had to change into come icon, which may or many not be a convenient mnemonic.

      I typically have 10-20 windows open at a time at work. Usually they are all at their smallest readable setting. I can't get enough space to keep them all visible at one time without iconifying them. I would prefer to "put-down" the ones I'm not using, to have them shrink, but remain readable, which would take a huge resolution to pull off. While I could do this in 2D with font size changes and such, I can still imagine there might be a more intuitive way to do these things in 3D (or 2 ½ D) I don't really need to view things off axis or rotated for text work, but that doesn't mean some aspects of a 3D OS might not be handy and production enhancing, but from experience I know 3D doesn't work well with out really high resolution.

  25. windows Accessibility by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Informative

    One of the things that ships with Windows is the magnifier accessibility applet - for people with poor vision. it turns the top of the screen into a magnified area of the screen under the mouse, so you can have the screen estate nicely laid out, and be still able to read any part of it you want to. (BTW I'm using XP, but I think its available on the other OS versions)

    You can change its settings, make it follow text editing cursor, and keyboard focus, (its quite cool actually, I may bump my resolution down to 1600x1200 on my 17" monitor and use it :-)

    Not only that, when you first start it up, you get a dialog box offering to take you to see more poor-vision tools on the web.

    10/10 for Microsoft on the accesibility features? na, this is /. after all.

    1. Re:windows Accessibility by Build6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      IANAL (and also not American, which will be relevant re: below-) but from what I understand, virtually all large US corporations have put in effort into this kind of thing - isnt' there some kind of "Americans with Disabilities Act" which legislates companies over a certain size having to make sure their products/services etc. can be used by, well, Americans with Disabilities?

      In which case for legal compliance (plus also the reasons both that they have enough money to make them worth suing, and that they have the resources to throw into developing such things) it is not surprising that they would have such features.

      that said, I am NOT saying this out of a knee-jerk anti-MS reaction (but, rather, a knee-jerk anti-all-large-corporations reaction :-)

    2. Re:windows Accessibility by Idealius · · Score: 1
      *ahem*

      not to be a stickler, but I think you meant, " bump my resolution up."

      Even though the everything will look smaller, it's still a higher resolution.

    3. Re:windows Accessibility by ---- · · Score: 2, Informative

      Accessibility Utilities in WinXP can be accessed via the [Win]-U key combination.

      It will open up the Magnifier (what was described),
      and Narrator (voice read-back of active window),
      and On-Screen Keyboard (uh, a clickable kweyboard).

      /* --- */

    4. Re:windows Accessibility by ralphus · · Score: 1
      They have to provide "reasonable accomodations". The ADA Myths and Facts page gives you a decent idea.

      If my job is stacking lumber and I loose my arms, there aren't many reasonable accomatations that can be made for me, although they can provide another job that I would be capable of.

      disclaimer (I spent too much time splitting wood and stacking lumber as a kid although chainsaws are fun)

      --
      Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
  26. Mac OS X can zoom in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Once zooming is activated in the universal access control panel of Mac OS X, pressing apple-option-+ zooms in, while preserving clarity.

    Also, the idea of senior citizens who have trouble seeing using linux is extremely laughable. I regularly help such people solve simple problems like ejecting a disk. I seriously doubt most would be able to do anything useful in linux at all.

    1. Re:Mac OS X can zoom in by jc42 · · Score: 1

      Hey, where's this OS "universal access control panel"? I've never heard of it, and the finder doesn't seem to be able to find it.

      Also, I've found that disk ejection is not just a problem on linux; I've seen people having problems getting the box to release the CD on every kind of system. Usually when this happens, you have to find the program that has grabbed the CD and kill it. This can be difficult if the app has closed its window but is still running windowless in the background. On Windows, often a reboot is the only solution. On linux, a kill -9 will do it, but you have to first discover the right pid. On OSX, I've found that opening a few CD/DVD apps at random and telling them to eject will eventually do the job, but it often takes a lot of tries before something works.

      Does any of these have an uncondition "Eject the CD right now, dammit!" command? Sure would be useful.

      Also, is there any way to learn these things other than by asking in a public forum like this?

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    2. Re:Mac OS X can zoom in by mindstrm · · Score: 1

      It's in the System Preferences, it's the icon that says "Universal Access", in the System section.

      Disk ejection is not a problem in linux. Unmount the disk, you can eject it.
      In windows, you can usually always eject a disk.
      In MacOS, it's usually not a problem unless you installed something weird. I've never found F12 to fail me.

      Yes, Google, usenet, and irc

    3. Re:Mac OS X can zoom in by Natalie's+Hot+Grits · · Score: 1

      "I've never found F12 to fail me."

      I work in a university environment where all the warranty work goes through the office I work in. Disk ejection is _THE_ number one service request on the mac. A great majority of this time it is user or program error, and not drive failure. #2 and #3 end up being HDD and PSU failure.

      On the windows side however, our number one, number 2, and number 3 most common service requests end up being hard drive failures, PSU failures, and rarely motherboard failures respectively.

      I got this from searching our service database in the past year.

      I don't know about the rest of the world, but I think this says a lot about how the Mac handles disk ejections. Considering the mac uses the same hard drives and utilizes 3rd party Mfg'd PSU's and motherboards, their failure rate is going to be approximately the same. And having worked with these people with problems ejecting disks, I can tell you that F12 fails me _All The Time_.

      --
      Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
    4. Re:Mac OS X can zoom in by HiredMan · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Also, is there any way to learn these things other than by asking in a public forum like this?

      The better question is, "Would please find another way to learn these things rather than asking in a public forum?"

      In Finder - access the Help menu. (It's last menu item as in ALL applications.) In the search section type "eject CD" or "How do I eject a disk" or any other number of things and you'll get a list of responses. Second on the list is:

      If your keyboard has an eject (F12) key, you can use that to eject a disc. If it doesn't, drag the disc icon the the eject icon in the Dock.

      Please at least RTFHelp docs before spouting off. That's why they're there. I'm sure the same thing works for "Universal Access" if you couldn't find it under System Preferences for some reason.

      Thanks, mindstrm - I'd mod you up if I had points. I've never tried the access panel under OSX - it absolutely rocks. The "text zooming" dialogue options are huge, black and white and san-serif so they're easy to read. The "zoom panel options" automatically speaks to you - assuming if you are having trouble seeing the screen you might need some help.
      Damn, well done Apple. This is meant to solve exactly the type of thing the poster asked about. How well it works on LCDs I can't test but that would be the next step.

      =tkk

      PS If you're in OSX and want to try it out - [option][apple]8 will automatically toggle zoom on/off and then [opt][apple]+/- controls size and mouse scrolls.

  27. are you retarded? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    MS Windows has a nice control panel to set the text size. It works irrepsective of LCD or CRT display.

    1. Ask slashdot a dumb question, making sure to mention linux, no matter how pathetic or tenuous the actual relationship to the question
    2. ????
    3. Front page!
  28. Windows Accessibility functions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you are actually having difficulty seeing Windows fonts, you can use the accessibility options.

    Go to the control panel, 'Accessibility options', then choose the 'Display' tab.

    Hit 'settings' in the 'high contrast' group, and use the menu in the middle of the window to choose a scheme. You could try 'windows standard (large)' or 'extra large', or any of the other options.

    If other people will be using the computer , you can turn on alt + left shift + print screen as a shortcut to turn high visibility on and off.

    Also, start > programs > accessories > accessibility > magnifier gives you a magnifying tool so you can see what you're pointing at on screen.

    Finally, you could get a screen and run it at half it's stated resolution.

  29. Get a Mac by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Turn on Zoom. Keep zooming until you can read the screen.

    If you don't have a Mac...
    Change the resolution. That works well too.

    Or use a UI hack, change the font size. That works as well.

  30. Make your fonts bigger by josh+crawley · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Make your fonts bigger, you dipstick. In Windows XP, right-click on the desktop, click Properties, click Appearance, and under Font Size pick Large or Extra Large. Oooooooooh difficult. Is your brain as impaired as your vision?

  31. Re:confirmed: I just shat all over myself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    first time I read that I almost DID shit myself! slashdot needs more quality content like this.

  32. Windows by sql*kitten · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is a great chance for Linux to get a head start in a certain market: older folks and those who have eye strain problems. Generally speaking, not many people can read Microsoft's widget text on a 150dpi display, which may explain why no one buys them even that they are available. Imagine how frustrating it could be for medical display (x-rays), cad, image editing to have a high resolution realistic image but cannot read the menu and text. If someone can come up with a Window manager to beat MS on 200dpi displays, no doubt this will capture a strong following in image related applications.

    Using XP, but it's almost the same on 2000 and NT:
    1. Right-click on the desktop
    2. Select "Properties" from the menu that will appear
    3. Select the "Appearance" tab from the window that will appear
    4. Select "Large" or "Extra large" from the "Font Size" menu on that pane.
    5. Click "OK"

    And you're done. This functionality has been in Windows for, I don't know, a decade or more. Generally, commercial OSs, whether Windows or Solaris or MacOS, leave free ones standing when it comes to accessibility. The reason is that they want to sell to corporates, and corporates have to comply with legislation like ADA. Free software authors generally don't have that incentive.
    1. Re:Windows by ptr2void · · Score: 3, Informative

      And you're done. This functionality has been in Windows for, I don't know, a decade or more. Generally, commercial OSs, whether Windows or Solaris or MacOS, leave free ones standing when it comes to accessibility. The reason is that they want to sell to corporates, and corporates have to comply with legislation like ADA. Free software authors generally don't have that incentive.

      Yes. The feature has been there for ages. Unused. At least 70% of the Windows desktop software (that I used) ignore it. Either they required manually choosing a different font, or didn't allow changing of font sizes at all. The strange thing is, all GTK+ apps support this fine -- out of the box, because it was designed into the toolkit itself. Windows development software OTOH assumed (does still assume?) that every f**king dialog has to be displayed in MS Sans Serif, 8 pixels. Yeah, commercial software is wonderful, isn't it?

    2. Re:Windows by utexaspunk · · Score: 0, Troll

      you moron, you didn't understand the question at all. he was talking about the widgets. the font size gets bigger, but the all the widgets stay the same size, often screwing up the text, too. ever notice how if you use windows at ANYTHING other than the normal font sizes it looks EXTREMELY shitty? I just switched mine to large text @ 1600x1200- sure, the text is readable, but now all the widgets are off-baseline and still tiny. MacOS X has got everyone beat on this with Quartz

    3. Re:Windows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OSX is commerical, and it blows anything GTK can do away, fuckface.

      Tell you what. While you are jerking off all over your leet Linux box, trying to resolve the 30 dependencies to get your software to run, the rest of the world will actually be doing work.

      Have fun living in your mom's basement.

    4. Re:Windows by cfish · · Score: 1

      Obviously this naive person has never set the fonts to "largest" and used it for a long period of time. Two problems with this:

      0. Many menu and dialog boxes have a fixed width widget, resulting a chopped off text and widgets.

      1. The text is still too small for "largest" if you use a high resolution display. Do you have any idea how small the strip of task bar looks like at high resolution? I believe many UNIX windows managers have the same problem: fixed size menu bars. So a change of display fonts will only "flow out" of their widgets.

      When you set the windows display font text, many things will be broken, including some basic installation stuffs.

    5. Re:Windows by jpop32 · · Score: 1

      Obviously this naive person has never set the fonts to "largest" and used it for a long period of time.

      Well, this, arguably not so naive, person has been using those exact features for years and found really no problems with it. In fact, you don't even think about it, it works that well. And I use a wide variety of software. I'd say the percentage of software that works fine is well above 90%. The exceptions being ancient (Win3.11-) and SW with custom widgets programmed by inept programmers.

      Besides, your post is factually incorrect. All windows widget sizes are defined not in pixels, but in relation to system font sizes. If you increase font sizes, all system widgets increase with them.

      Furthermore, if 'Large (125%)' setting is too small for your super-duper 23" screen, you can always enter the value manually.

      So there, more information to assimilate.

    6. Re:Windows by jpop32 · · Score: 1

      The feature has been there for ages. Unused. At least 70% of the Windows desktop software (that I used) ignore it.

      Really? Which, pray tell, software is that? You must be extremely unlucky with your choice of software, or abandoned the platform years ago, since my experience is radically different. I have large icons and large fonts set up, and never give it a second thought. Any modern Windows software scales with the system font settings easily. The major notable exceptions being programs ported from Linux. :-)

      Seriously, you can spot Linux/Unix-ported GUI-based SW from a mile away, it usually looks and behaves radically different (read: completely ignoring standard windows look&feel) than native applications. Which, I guess it's understandable, but still annoying none the less.

  33. what you say! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This story isn't hentai, but it is very ecchi. There are no descriptions of sexual activity or perversion, just a simple romantic story that goes much further then then the Manga's ever will. I hope you enjoy it!
    Jer K.
    It was late. Later then normal.

    The temple glowed with moonlight as Keiichi and Belldandy stepped up to the front door, hand in hand.
    "I had a wonderful time tonight, Keiichi-san," Belldandy said with a
    soft smile.

    "Anytime I spend with you is wonderful," Keiichi was quick to reply. He never missed a chance to remind Belldandy of how much she meant to him.

    A calm, peaceful silence floated about the two as Keiichi walked
    Belldandy down the hall. A silence accentuated by the fact that Urd and Skuld, Belldandy's resident sister's, had been taken on a girl's weekend out, camping in the mountains with Keiichi's sister Megumi.
    As they reached the door to Belldandy's room, Keiichi opened it for
    her.

    "Goodnight, Belldandy," he said smiling.

    "Goodnight, Keiichi-san" Belldandy smiled back at him. As they gazed
    into each others eyes, thoughts began running through Keiichi's head at the speed of light... so many times had he been looking at Belldandy's smiling face like this and he had done nothing.

    "Why?" he thought, "Why can't I do it?"
    Instinctively, the two gently embraced. Holding Belldandy close,
    Keiichi continued to think. "Belldandy means so much to me, she's always
    there for me, but... does she... does she want me to...?" As the
    romantic moment lingered, Keiichi became more and more scared.
    Holding Keiichi so close, Belldandy could not help sensing Keiichi's
    fear with her powers. She was confused as to why he could feel this way
    now, and concerned, as well. To comfort him, she pulled him a little
    tighter, letting out a soft moan.
    Suddenly, Keiichi felt his feelings change, and somehow, he felt a
    confidence he had never had before. Was it because Urd and Skuld were so
    far away? Or could it simply be the passing of time, just having known
    Belldandy for so long, that caused him to finally muster this kind of
    courage? He didn't have time to answer before his instincts took over.
    Keiichi took a deep breath, and let go of Belldandy a little, just so
    he could see her face. Belldandy could not help returning his gaze.
    Seeing each-others eyes so close, they were both filled with such fear,
    yet somehow they could not look away. It was if a magnet was pulling
    them closer, ever so slowly, yet much to powerfully to even try to fight
    it. It was happening so quick, yet somehow lasted for an eternity.
    Their lips touched, and every feeling of fear and doubt flooded out of
    their bodies. They held each other tighter then they ever had before,
    and were both filled with such an incredible feeling of warmth and
    comfort. For the first time since Belldandy had arrived in Keiichi's
    world, they didn't feel like a couple, or like two people who liked each
    other... They were one. One spirit, one soul, one entity in this world.
    They felt a oneness with each other that could not be separated by any
    force, in Keiichi's world or Belldandy's heaven. Not even Kami-sama
    himself could separate them.
    The moment ended as quickly as it had began. As they let go, they both
    could not stop staring at each other's smiling face. It was the first
    time Keiichi had ever kissed Belldandy, a moment, a feeling, that they
    both knew even then that they would never forget.
    "Goodnight, Belldandy..." Keiichi whispered again as he slowly turned
    to walk back down the hall.
    Belldandy watched as Keiichi walked towards the darkness, and now it
    was her mind thinking at warp speed. "That felt so wonderful, but why
    did it never happen before? What has happened that made Keiichi so bold?
    Why was he never like that before?" Belldandy touched her lips, where
    Keiichi's lips had touched just seconds ago. "I wish that had happened
    sooner. Was it because of me that Keiichi had not done

  34. Great bussiness by RoadkillBunny · · Score: 0

    Yeah right... Linux is getting a great head start at selling computers to grandpas... Wait a sec, grandpas don't use computers...

    --
    Cheers,
    RoadkillBunny
  35. Crt's Being Phased Out? by luekj · · Score: 1

    Does this mean that we will soon see cheapo monitor liquidations?? I sure hope so.

    --
    Many Thanks,

    Luke

    1. Re:Crt's Being Phased Out? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      It's already happening. Check the price of a 21" Trinitron today vs. a couple of years ago.

      ~~~

  36. No doubt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This has been in Mac OS since version 6 maybe? And in Windows since 3.1? Lame Ask Slashdot (as if there is any other kind).

  37. App Developers Take Note! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Yeah,there are lots of ways to workaround this. Reading glasses, magnifying glass, changing the windows font size, etc.

    What is being asked for is for a simple way to make this work. One that does not involved LOTS of tradeoffs or jumping through hoops on the user side.

    I've set up several Windoze boxes with larger font sizes, but too often the application developers NEVER CONSIDERED it, or that part of the dev process was cut for time. Dialog boxes, menus, forms, and all kinds of other things fail to fit on the screen or even let you scroll to them. (Most WWW stuff is easier since it at least line wraps.)

    The OSS suggestion is to provide the large fonts display just like windows, but to verify the UI and the apps use it correctly. Such consistency would be a strong selling point!

  38. YOU FAIL IT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    you were a whole 2 minutes late, what is wrong with you???

  39. Native Resolution by Detritus · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Many new LCD displays have hardware support for scaling non-native resolutions. You can run the display at 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, etc. without it looking horrible.

    The long-term trend in displays is to decouple capture/creation resolution from storage/transport resolution from display resolution.

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    1. Re:Native Resolution by jetmarc · · Score: 1

      > hardware support for scaling non-native resolutions

      You're referring to techniques and tricks to make the image look better. However,
      it just doesn't work to perfection. It's a physical impossible.

      When the display has 1280 pixels in a line, and is supposed to stretch 1024 pixels
      to the full width, every virtual pixel will cover 1.25 physical pixels (1024 * 1.25
      equals 1280).

      That is, the display can either duplicate every 4th pixel (map 4 input pixels to 5
      output pixels). Older laptops use to do this (the first generation that didn't show
      black borders). This is acceptable for images, but gives very chunky results on text.

      Or, it can interpolate the color value of the pixels, much like an anti-aliasing
      filter does. In the first order that means, the first physical pixel is covered
      to 100% by the color of the first virtual pixel. The 2nd physical pixel gets 25%
      of the 1st virtual pixel color, and 75% of its color are dominated by the 2nd
      virtual pixel. The 3rd receives 50% from virtual #2 and 50% from virtual #3. Etc.

      I think, this is how most (all?) of todays displays work. The mapping is local to
      small blocks, and can be stored in the controller as lookup table. The color mixing
      can be done using shifters and adders (cheap logic). However, the result is not
      100% optimal: Each first and 5th pixel (in the example of 1024->1280) is 100% at
      the color of the virtual counterpart, while the other 3 pixels are not. A perfect
      filter would distribute the error over all pixels, so that the 1st+5th would suffer
      a bit, while the other 3 pixels would be nearer to their original color. However,
      that would require real algorithms (rather then lookup tables), as used in radio
      and telecom transmissions (keyword: multirate digital signal processing).

      But -- and that's why I'm writing this follow up -- while such an interpolation can
      be the best possible match, it still is not as good as the original picture. The
      output will always lack clarity and contrast, especially because most display use
      is text based. Windows uses bitmap fonts to have exact control over each pixel,
      and you give up on this as soon as you start to interpolate.

      Marc

  40. Still, they look weird at lower res. by gotr00t · · Score: 2, Informative

    It is true that LCDs actually have a fixed resolution, but you can actually adjust them. When this happens, the monitor makes two or more pixels represent one. However, this is a huge disadvantage, because of the fact that resolutions usually don't divide into each other evenly, there are some regions that are duped, some that are not, making a really wavy image that is readable, but still rather unclear.

    1. Re:Still, they look weird at lower res. by kisrael · · Score: 1

      It is true that LCDs actually have a fixed resolution, but you can actually adjust them. When this happens, the monitor makes two or more pixels represent one.
      No, what people are saying is that most new monitors have antialiasing built-in now, so it's not some old pixel = 1 new pixel and some old pixels = 2 new pixels, it's every new pixels = 1.3 or something old pixels. Like "smart resizing" an image in photoshop or irfanview.

      It's a bit on most monitors, but at work I have a laptop that has an insanely useless rez of 1600x1200 pixels--the screen just isn't big enough to justify that resolution, and images are tiny, tiny. Luckily, the native pixels are tiny enough that the blurring is barely noticealbe at 1024 or 1280.

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
    2. Re:Still, they look weird at lower res. by wo1verin3 · · Score: 1

      >>It's a bit on most monitors, but at work I
      >>have a laptop that has an insanely useless rez
      >>of 1600x1200 pixels--the screen just isn't big
      >>enough to justify that resolution, and images
      >>are tiny, tiny. Luckily, the native pixels are
      >>tiny enough that the blurring is barely
      >>noticealbe at 1024 or 1280.

      I used to do tech support at one of the large OEMs, and everytime someone called in complaining, I always wanted to ask them WHY the asked for the highest resolution if they had no idea what that meant. Why would you buy something before seeing it or trying it?

    3. Re:Still, they look weird at lower res. by kisrael · · Score: 1

      I used to do tech support at one of the large OEMs, and everytime someone called in complaining, I always wanted to ask them WHY the asked for the highest resolution if they had no idea what that meant. Why would you buy something before seeing it or trying it?
      It wasn't like I was offered a choice!
      I used to run by 17" monitor at 800x600 'cause it was more comfortable. In fact, I asked for a LCD flatpanel and got the laptop instead. I was just sick of CRTs.

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
  41. Perhaps future KDE versions? by GeekDork · · Score: 2, Informative

    XFree can handle screen DPI so that all other applications can use it productively. That's a pretty good base to build on. And no one yell "X sucks" now. Any framework that provides that measure would be suitable!

    Now that gives you a way to make measurements unrelated to screen resolution. Handling fonts becomes ridiculously easy, and from my experience it's taken into account quite nicely. Just try fiddling with the physical screen measurements in your XF86Config.

    Now, where KDE comes in is the part when we aren't talking about pure text anymore. KDE has at least the ability to handle icons created from SVG source which scale "lossless" and could also be tailored to use the resolution-independent measures.

    --

    Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.

  42. Large fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Linux has been doing it for years. Ctrl+Alt+F1.

  43. Already works fine by po8 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The font sizes, icon sizes, etc are all user-configurable in the stock KDE and GNOME environments. I have vision problems, and run 1600x1200 on a 19" display routinely with no problem.

    <OFFTOPIC>I wish folks would at least spend 15 minutes investigating on their own before asking Slashdot. I also wish the editors would enforce this. Booting off a Knoppix CD would have answered the question in advance.</OFFTOPIC>

    1. Re:Already works fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The answers to these questions may be obvious to you, and true google could cover them quickly. But the questions topic is good and I find the responses (the good ones) very educational.

      I liken it to the utne for the tech industry.

    2. Re:Already works fine by cfish · · Score: 1

      Oh, believe me, you havn't read more manuals than I. It's not that trivial. There are many other problems covered in other posts. But we'll talk when you become blind enough. If you aren't sitting more than 2 feet from the monitor, it will happen to you sooner than you expect.

  44. Re:Hello, Mr. Potatohead by HiredMan · · Score: 1

    "Mr. Potatohead, Mr. Potatohead! Remember when you asked me to tell you when you were behaving rudely and insensitively? Well, you're doing it now."

    Sheesh!

    =tkk

  45. Long-Term solution by Detritus · · Score: 1

    The long-term solution is to remove resolution dependencies from GUI software. The application shouldn't know or care about the resolution of the frame buffer or the user's display. Try running a Windows application at multiple resolutions, different display sizes, small/large fonts, and with different video cards. It is a real PITA to make the application's GUI look decent under all those combinations.

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  46. Just change the font scaling... by tc · · Score: 1

    Control panel / Display / Appearance, adjust the Font Size combo-box.

    What's the problem?

  47. Uhh huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Have you ever used an LCD.. Hell have you ever used a PC?

    Change the font size in your OS, you fucking dipshit.

    And LCDs arent fixed resolution... yes they have a true resolution (my 17 inch LCD has 1280x1024 physical pixels), but you can still run at 640x480 if you wanted, or even larger.. it doesn't look as good as it would on a crt (since it has to be squished/stretched to scale to 1280x1024, but its damn readable)

    And with ClearType font rendering (on winxp), text is even easier to read.

    I have bad vision and switching to LCD was the best thing ive ever done.

    (And P.S. if you have a 21 inch CRT, that doesnt mean you need a 21 inch LCD.. Get a 19 inch, since it is equivelent to 21 inch... just like my 17 in is like 19 inch, and 15 inch is like 17 inch)

    1. Re:Uhh huh? by jimmy_dean · · Score: 1

      Why are you so angry sounding. Can't you leave the name calling for the people still in grade school? My gosh, the guy just had a concern and you could just reply back with your information and leave the anger out...what has he ever done to you?

      --
      -> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
    2. Re:Uhh huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm angry because he's RETARDED

      His whole question seems like a troll that somehow got accepted. I bet he's laughing in his chair with his 20/20 vision while posting GNAA posts on slashdot.

      P.S. He raped my mom and killed my father.

    3. Re:Uhh huh? by jay-be-em · · Score: 1

      Didn't you read the post?

      "I have a very weak eye and..."

      I'm sure you'd be bitter had you only one eye too.

      --
      "Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
  48. It is not that bad... by ThunderRiver · · Score: 1

    For older folks, they have much more problems seeing words that are too big than words shown too small because their eye balls are aging.

    Anyway, next time, if you really want to make fun of some older people...and if they want you to write a letter for an apology..make sure you write gigantic words! Like 500 Dpi...bigger the better..

  49. I think you are overstating the problem. by mindstrm · · Score: 1

    I mean, yes, a fully scaleable vectorized desktop would be great, where you could scale any component to the size you want, and keep the layout intact, that woudl be great... but..

    in Windows:

    - You can change font sizes
    - Even better, go into the advanced desktop settings, and set the DPI setting to 120 (it defaults to 96). This will cause all kinds of changes to make things more readable at a higher resolution. For those who haven't tried, please don't tell me it will make things smaller; this setting tells windows what resolution your display is, so it can compensate visually.

    - If the widgets and buttons are too small in windows, you can quit easily grab some skinning tool and grab a theme with larger buttons and window bars.

    Really, this is not a big problem.. I would be surprised if you can't quite easily overcome the problem of your high resolution display. I dare say, easier than you can in linux.

    Linux: Window managers support themes. Font sizes are scaleable. What more do you want?

    OSX: Same deal

    The only problem you will come across is some applications where the layout is not done correctly, and when fonts scale, things become unreadable. You know, like when the stupid company's make some popup configuratin window with a bunch of columns in it that are too small to read the full text of each, but they won't let you resize the window. Really brilliant design there.

    1. Re:I think you are overstating the problem. by ptr2void · · Score: 2, Informative

      Really, this is not a big problem.. I would be surprised if you can't quite easily overcome the problem of your high resolution display. I dare say, easier than you can in linux.

      Yeah, Bill Windows Luser again tries to use his brain. Next time, check the facts...

      XF86 detects display dpi automatically. (Though you can still override the dpi value if something goes wrong...)

      _ALL_ GTK+ apps scale their fonts properly _by default_. This is a major design feature of the GTK+ toolkit. Not like in Windows, where every second app stays at a 8-pixel bitmap font and ignores user preferences happily. I imagine the situation is similar on the Qt side.

    2. Re:I think you are overstating the problem. by Jhan · · Score: 1
      _ALL_ GTK+ apps scale their fonts properly _by default_. This is a major design feature of the GTK+ toolkit.

      Yes, cool, GTK scales fonts, does what Windows and Mac has attempted and not-quite-succeded with.

      BUT, that's not what this is about, at all! You don't want to scale fonts, what the user wants is to scale the ENTIRE UI. Gadgets, window frames, images, text... Basically, he want's to switch from 640x480 to 1600x100 and see the same desktop (same sized windows, same sized icons, same distances between them), only with higher resolution. Apple has all the tech they need to make this (BASIC, OBVIOUS) behaviour a reality. Have they? No...

      --

      I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.

    3. Re:I think you are overstating the problem. by mindstrm · · Score: 1

      Welll, I run windows at 120dpi, and NONE of my apps have ever refused to scale.

      So.. check your facts buddy. Maybe you didn't notice the DPI setting?

    4. Re:I think you are overstating the problem. by ptr2void · · Score: 1

      Well, I can only repeat: it does not work.

  50. That's funny. by mindstrm · · Score: 1

    Because when I crank up the DPI setting in windows, I get just that.. smoother text, smoother widgets, and a better looking, sharper screen.

    As for "how many people want to go into advanced settings" what are you kidding? That's one click away in windows... that's no big deal. That doesnt' even register as a hard to find place in the windows world. That's what that setting is FOR.

    Opera scales entire pages, btw.

  51. Have consideration for the aged... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...I'm here to tell all of you youngbloods out there, there are two things that are bad for your eyes, reading and watching TV. Most of your Slashdot reading off of "TV" screens much of the time. As you age, the eyeball doesn't bend as well and you lost the ability to focus.

    This becomes a BIG deal. In my last job, I worked with all lot of insensitive people who had no consideration for the differences between us all. Be considerate. You are only temporary in good shape. It will not last forever, dudes.

  52. Dude, just don't zoom in really far. by BitwizeGHC · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's like a head trip and really scary to zoom till there's giganting mouse pointer filling your screen. Like you're gonna fall into the space between two pixels or something, maaan. Must be totally wicked when you're high.

    --
    N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
  53. For Web browsing... by Qa1 · · Score: 1

    Get Mozilla/Firebird. You can enlarge the display fonts as much as you like. Much better the IE, which only lets you enlarge them to an arbitrary extent, and even that works only on sites which hasn't specified exact font sizes in their CSS.

    1. Re:For Web browsing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course, any discussion no matter how irrelelvant has to have a plug for Mozilla and how IE is horrible. Get a life.

  54. Matter of economics and not technology by derfla8 · · Score: 1

    There is nothing here that is out of the ordinary with any other consumer good. The money is in making products with high consumer demand, and hence consumer monitor manufacturers are stepping up to the high demand on LCD panels versus CRTs.

    The market that you fall into is what would be "specialty".

  55. Why get a new monitor when you can just... by Transcendent · · Score: 1

    ...get reading glasses?

  56. Laughable? by mindstrm · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    How many years until you are a senior citizen? Eyesight failing?

    By your comment, I'd guess you are around 20.

    I can think of many good linux hackers who are in their 40s, and certainly know a number of hardcore linux/unix guys who are in their mid to late 50s...

    So what was that about no senior citizens? Maybe you won't be going out to teach gramps linux, but there are a number of people who WILL very shortly be having trouble with their eyesight.. so the question is very valid.

    1. Re:Laughable? by Natalie's+Hot+Grits · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not to mention all the people in their twenties with poor eyesite already...

      --
      Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
  57. Opera has a great zoom feature that might help out by james72 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's a tip : Use Opera for your web browser. Even in Windows, you get beautifully magnified text/graphics when you use the in-built zoom. -James.

  58. uhuh by mlerner · · Score: 0

    ya know if you can't read text from a computer screen properly, you can either adjust it, or go outside and get some damn fresh air.

  59. Here is an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Current GUIs realy suck for any high resolution display, and this applies to all platforms. If you want a very high resolution (e.g. above the 2kx1.5k range), you have to put up with very small fonts and windows with most programs. Even if you raise the font sizes, lots of programs werent designed with high resolutions in mind in that they can only tolerate a certain range of font sizes. E.g. you'll see large fonts and microscopic check boxes, or you'll have a fixed window width whereas the large fonts are too big for the window at their smallest readable size, and therefore are cut off.

    What we should migrate to in the future should be some kind of vector based GUIs. Mainly, instead of defining scalable things like window sizes and font sizes by their pixel size, they should be defined by a percentage of the screen.

    This would otherwise demand quite a bit in terms of system performance, but the modern day video cards should be well capable of handling the task (and some) in hardware.

  60. Funny math- 200DPI=2400x1800 at 15" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Reading most of the above comments, I first must say that it is sad the disregard that most slasdhot users seem to give this question and this man.

    That said, his math is bogus. Most displays today are only about 100DPI. A 200DPI 15" display would run at 2400x1800 (I want one of those!), 150DPI is 1800x1350. 15" 1600x1200 notebooks run at 133DPI, and 1400x1050 notebooks (14") run at 125DPI.

    That said, the problem is not DPI, it's a failure of scaling text (eithre by hand or programatically) by pixels instead of a "real world" metric, e.g., inches or points.

    Higher DPI is actually a godsend for those with poorer vision. Hold a page up a book up to your monitor- the text in the book will likely be _smaller_ than that on even the highest resolution monitor running the most ridiculously small by still usable font. That's because the book is printed at, typically, somewhere between 600 and 2400 DPI. And you can read it just fine.

    That it to say, given two characters of equal phisical dimensions, the higher resolution one is significantly easier to read.

    What the poster really wants is the highest possible DPI, but a way to keep it the same size on the screen.

  61. where are you by tongue · · Score: 1

    if you're in the US, then the employer is bound by the ADA (americans with disabilities act) to make reasonable accomodations for your disability if you can still perform your job. Keeping an extra CRT around is totally reasonable, so if you just ask your employer to keep your old monitor b/c of your eyes, I'm sure they'd be willing to accomodate you on that. if not maybe they'll accomodate your lawyer :)

  62. WTF? by mackstann · · Score: 1

    A window manager draws borders on your windows and possibly a menu and a dock and possibly some other small things -- it has absolutely nothing to do with the text size or widgets used in your applications.

    How the fuck did something like this make it to the front page of slashdot? Oh wait..

  63. "LCDs have fixed resolution:" (semi-)myth. by Slartibartfast · · Score: 5, Informative

    What they have is a fixed number of pixels. The entirely unsatisfactory solution to this dilemma is to merely drive it at an inferior resolution. It'll look like garbage, but it'll be bigger. A much better solution, however, is to drive it at an even divisor of the number of pixels, which will give you clean output. For example, a 1600x1200 LCD could be driven at 800x600; the letters will be nice and crisp, and will be four times larger.

    1. Re:"LCDs have fixed resolution:" (semi-)myth. by BlacKat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unless, of course, the LCD manufacturer is scaling *WITH* antialiasing...

      Like, for example, the Multilink box I have with my SGI 1600SW... this little box can display virtually any resolution crisply and cleanly on my 1600x1024 native resolution panel.

      I have never, ever, had a problem with an ugly display, all fonts look proportional and correct at all times no matter the operating resolution.

      If I were to get another LCD (which I will since I'll never buy a CRT again) I would ONLY get one with antialised scaling of non-native resolutions. :)

    2. Re:"LCDs have fixed resolution:" (semi-)myth. by swordfishBob · · Score: 1

      I don't know where you all get your hi-res LCDs, but the ones I've seen here don't go above 1280x1024, even for 18 or 19 inch models. Personally I'm frustrated by this - my eyes are good, and with emote machine admin and gui development I want the extra pixels. But it should work out well for you, also given that LCDs at native resolution are much clearer than CRTs.

      --
      -- All your bass are below two Hz
    3. Re:"LCDs have fixed resolution:" (semi-)myth. by UTPinky · · Score: 1

      I'm on my T30 Thinkpad right now w/ a res of 1400x1050. My friend's laptop (compaq I think) does 1600x1200. Just look around, not that hard to find.

      --
      I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
    4. Re:"LCDs have fixed resolution:" (semi-)myth. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are 20" LCDs available currently from several vendors (Viewsonic, Hitachi, LaCie, LG, at least) that do 1600x1200, and bigger models that do more.

      There are also a couple of 19" LCDs capable of 1600x1200 (from Eizo and Iiyama).

    5. Re:"LCDs have fixed resolution:" (semi-)myth. by Slartibartfast · · Score: 1

      Actually, no: _also_ owning a 1600sw with Multilink adapter, I'll flat-out state that, unless you're driving it at an even divisor (it also allows 800x512, if you read the docs), you get fuzzy letters, somewhat akin to sub-pixel rendering. Having had to use it in non-1600x1024 resolution occasionally (my Number 9 died), it's like night and day when I go back.

  64. LCD + Windows + Large Fonts + ClearType = a Winner by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Linux sucks (default Red Hat 9.0) on my installation. Fonts are waaaayyy bad, text is not properly spaced, not antialiased, etc etc.

    Why ? because geeks make it (I am not blaming them of course, Linux is a great O/S).

    Until the usability issue is solved, forget Linux getting ahead of Windows in anything.

  65. since you already have vision issues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this site is probably safe for you! ;)

  66. Window Managers for Wet Macular Degeneration? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have an AMD illness, which makes me see straight lines wavy.

    Although most /.ers are probably too young for this kind of condition, I wonder if anyone knows of a WM that could help.

    (Posting as an AC, since I don't want my boss to know about this)

  67. Reminds me of Mozilla. by MickLinux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sometimes, changing the default font size *is* revolutionary.

    When I was getting my Linux up and running, I installed Mozilla, and found that for all the menus, the default font size was 256. Let's see: 12 pt. = 1/6", so 256~2.5" high characters.

    So I started going through, painstakingly looking up all the variables, and setting the "Main text bar menu default font size="... and so on. Finally got my browser up, and then discovered: the email menus!

    Fun, fun fun!

    Anyhow, I started looking for help on this (using Konquerer of course), and found lots of people posting "how do I make my default font sizes right, across the board?"

    Nothing. No answers. Nada

    Anyhow, I eventually stumbled across the answer: in your XFree86config file, you have to have your fonts in the right order: fonts/misc, then your 100dpi fonts, and finally your truetype fonts.

    Other than that, it loads the postscript fonts as default.

    Now, this might seem to be unrelated, but it isn't. It isn't always easy to set your default font sizes. Sometimes, it's extremely unobvious.

    --
    Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
  68. Since CRTs are hard to find in stores... by antdude · · Score: 1

    Are there any good local stores in Los Angeles, CA, USA that carry a large selection of CRT monitors? It is hard to find a good monitor brand and model.

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  69. Slashdot has turned into a comedy sight... by Beatlebum · · Score: 0, Troll

    The same guys that are debating privacy/encryption and other complicated issues can't even figure out how to change font size.

  70. Problem with glasses by pipingguy · · Score: 1


    ...is that they keep slipping down off your nose. I know! I'll invent something to prevent this and call it...Opti-Grab, yeah, that's the ticket!

  71. CRTs phasing out? by macmark · · Score: 1

    Not until LCDs can display colors as well as CRTs, you won't find many LCDs being used by anyone who does professional graphics.

    1. Re:CRTs phasing out? by BlacKat · · Score: 1

      Quite a few of the "high-end" LCD manufacturers do actually have color calibration and correction built into the monitor you know... for those professionals who need perfect color.

      My nice SGI 1600SW even has the calibration port in the back of the monitor, however I decided I didn't really *need* the calibration device since I won't be doing anything that requires "perfect color" any time soon.

  72. Re: make it work in Mac OS X by patrickoehlinger · · Score: 1
    So how do you make it work? I'm typing this on a new Powerbook with OSX, and I have sorta figured out how to change the font sizes (though they don't always seem to stay changed). But this applies only to text. The writer was asking about such things as menus, images, etc. Nothing I do changes any of these at all.

    Mac OS X features some tools for people with sight problems: universal access
    Seeing If you have impaired vision, Mac OS X provides a range of options to help you see what's on screen. The fantastic display option "Zoom" uses the Quartz rendering and compositing engine to magnify the contents of your screen. Quartz makes graphics and type smooth, providing a high-quality experience.
    Use the White on Black option to give your display higher contrast, allowing you to read text more easily. You can use speech recognition to launch applications as well as to execute application commands instead of typing or mousing. The system will also speak alerts, selected text and text underneath your mouse.

    --
    >> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
  73. CRTs will be here for a while by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 1

    CRTs are not going away anytime soon. Sony and Mitsubishi will be making these things for a while. Nice CRTs still have much better focus, color accuracy, and pixel response times then LCDs.

    It is technically impossible for LCDs to have the same quality potential that CRTs have. Moreover, CRTs are a lot cheeper... and you literally get more for less.

    But if you do have a disability, have you ever tried an OS X machine with 'Zoom' enabled? It uses quartz to scale the desktop and therefore you don't need to change resolutions.

    --
    "Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
    1. Re:CRTs will be here for a while by BlacKat · · Score: 1

      "Nice CRTs still have much better focus, color accuracy, and pixel response times then LCDs"

      Uhh... an LCD is *ALWAYS* in perfect focus since there is no gun firing electrons at a coating of phospher to make light.

      Color accuracy is just as accurate, if not MORE so being 100% digital, on LCD's.

      However, the old CRT tech does still have a faster "response time", however, this is also being taken over by LCD's.

      These days, with the rescaling algorithms being used on LCD monitors, I can think of no reason NOT to get another one. ;)

  74. Slightly Confused by matth · · Score: 1

    FROM THE ARTICLE "1024x768 on a 21" monitor, sitting 2 feet away. "

    That's a HUGE screen area... I don't see how the author is making a point.... how will LCDs cause problems? An LCD will still run at 1024x768 and you can sitll sit at 2 feet away.

  75. Which is the bigger waste? by Eevee · · Score: 1

    Running the monitor at 800x600 and being comfortable when working? Or running the monitor at 1600x1200 and not being able to do anything because you can't read the screen?

    1. Re:Which is the bigger waste? by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 1
      Running the monitor at 800x600 and being comfortable when working? Or running the monitor at 1600x1200 and not being able to do anything because you can't read the screen?

      The waste is being tricked into buying an LCD for 3 times the cost of a CRT of equivalent size because somebody says they're phasing them out. I'll believe that when the moon falls out of the sky. CRTs aren't going *anywhere* anytime soon. Maybe in the 22nd century. CRTs are still much much nicer than LCDs for everything IMHO.

  76. Wrong Setting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Which is clearly Microsoft's fault for it's confusing option boxes. The setting on the Properties->Appearance tab only affects titles bars and explorer. It won't affect application fonts (such as the display of web pages).

    Changing Properties->Settings->Advanced->General:Font Size setting allows you to set the system-wide dpi setting to anything you want for all fonts, which affects pretty much everything that the system displays.

    One of the stated design goals of Longhorn's new UI is even better support for high-dpi displays, so if Linux is going to come up with better support they better do it quickish.

    1. Re:Wrong Setting by Dahan · · Score: 1
      Changing Properties->Settings->Advanced->General:Font Size setting allows you to set the system-wide dpi setting to anything you want for all fonts, which affects pretty much everything that the system displays.

      Yup, I have a 133dpi LCD on my laptop (1600x1200 on a 15" diagonal), and text is wonderfully clear and easy-to-read. If you tell Windows that your display is 133 dpi, it will use more pixels to make a given point size font compared to the default 96 dpi screen--if you ask for a 12 point font, it'll really be 1/6" high, instead of 3/25".

  77. Umm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Increase your window manger's font size, increase the font size of any toolkits. For example, I once made a .gtkrc with HUGE fonts that are readable from a few feet away. (This is because I was displaying things on a television.)

    This is pretty much a no-brainer. You do not need a special window manager, and at any rate, it's the toolkits that handle application widgets, not the WM.

  78. In the Opera browser ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    1.)Hold Ctrl down on the keyboard

    2.)Roll the mouse wheel forward to zoom

    3.)Sit back an read

  79. Mod parent up please! by sql*kitten · · Score: 1

    Thanks

  80. Why Anti-Windows? by sridev · · Score: 1

    Why should this article be anti-windows? Both Windows and Linux don't have good support for large fonts on hihg-res displays. This is an opportunity to improve not only Lunix but also Windows - which incidently most of use use on a daily basis! I don't think most people care what OS they are using as long as they are browsing the web or reading e-mail.

    I feel that most Slashdot articles (like this one) are Linux biased - this does not make the discussion better but moves the focus away from the topic under discussion (accessibility in this case) and instead focusses on a Linux-Windows argument.

    Oops! I'll stop now.. I think I'm starting a different discussion myself!

    1. Re:Why Anti-Windows? by Fjodor42 · · Score: 1

      Is it indeed?

      Not trying to throw/attract flames, is it possible to create a new window manager for Windows with his suggestions in mind?

      It is, with XFree86, that is the graphic engine for most unices, including Linux, which is why it makes sense to seek help in this area.

      I should guess, that there are more *nix developers on /. than there are developers of (not for) windows...

      --
      "The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
  81. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  82. Some vision problems are not always correctible by pario · · Score: 1

    I found this remark offensive, too. There are people whose weak eyesight is not correctible with glasses. I have a friend who was born prematurely and his retina was permanently damaged as a result due to the lack of oxygen supply to it. He can bearly see things, and when he uses his computer he has to bring his face so close to the monitor that his face literally touches it. For those with a problem similar to that of the submitter, this joke is not funny at all.

    1. Re:Some vision problems are not always correctible by MarkCollette · · Score: 1

      I just watched a documentary on TV about these kids who were abused for years. Almost made me cry, reminding me of things from my past.

      If someone made a generalist joke about something like that, I would laugh, because I have a sense of humor, and am not a big baby who spouts off about how people should feel sorry for me.

      And you're not even talking about yourself, you're talking about someone else, as if you can wrap yourself in their victim-hood.

    2. Re:Some vision problems are not always correctible by merennulli · · Score: 1

      I too have a sense of humor, but I also know what is funny and what is rude.

      There are plenty of people out there who cannot wear corrective lenses, either because they are ineffective, or because the lenses further damage the eyes.

      This is a serious problem and making light of it only serves to offend.

      I'm rather surprised a post was allowed that complains about people simply because they actually care about others.

    3. Re:Some vision problems are not always correctible by MarkCollette · · Score: 1

      You are only offended if you choose to be. Matters of rudeness, humor, etc. are all subjective, which depends on your personality, so don't assume that your perception is indicative of what something is, in absolute terms.

      I'll go one step further, and assert that even if a statement is intended to be rude or humorous, that it still depends on the recipient's interpretation.

      No one is complaining about you caring. I just find it non-sensical for you to assert that a joke is not funny at all, merely because you do not find it funny. Period.

  83. Fullscreen Strongbad! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just change sbemailXX.html to sbemailXX.swf =)

  84. KDE/GNOME look fine, but the 'net doesn't by PeteyG · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's possible to make everything in KDE and GNOME nice and legibile at super high resolutions. The only thing that keeps me from making the jump up to the 1600x1200 res on my laptop display is fact that the layout of websites and the pictures the provide is totally screwed up when I make the font sizes huge.

    What we NEED is a browser feature that will allow you to specify the zoom percentage you want to view websites at. For instance, if I set it to %150, then EVERYTHING (fonts, tables, images, etc.) would be fifty percent bigger. This would go a LONG way in making it easy for people to handle higher resolutions.

    We need this. Because frankly, the only thing keeping me in 1024 land is how tiny the layout of the Internet is at 1600x1200.

    --
    no thanks
    1. Re:KDE/GNOME look fine, but the 'net doesn't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Opera?

  85. How to change in Linux by Richard_J_N · · Score: 3, Informative

    I had the same problem - my wonderful Thinkpad A22p has a 1600x1200 LCD at 15" (that's 133 dpi) and the default fonts are almost unreadable. This is what's needed - and it will change fonts globally.

    1)In XF86Config-4, add the DisplaySize option like this:

    Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Generic|Generic Laptop Display Panel 1600x1200"
    VendorName "Generic"
    ModelName "Unknown"
    #Sort out tiny fonts - these are width, height in mm
    DisplaySize 304 228

    2)Change the line in /etc/X11/Xresources to

    Xft.dpi: 133

    where 133 is the value of xdpyinfo | grep resolution.

    Then, restart X and the xfont server (xfs), and log back into KDE. The fonts should all look better (and larger). Hope that helps.

    Richard

  86. Not mythical, just expensive by sootman · · Score: 2, Informative

    ViewSonic has a 200 DPI 22.2" display, 3840x2400.
    (http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd _vp2290b.htm )
    And Dell makes the Inspiron 8500 notebook with a 1920x1200 screen--that's 150 dpi, folks. That's the same number of pixels as the 23" Apple HD Cinema Display. The future is coming and it's going to be high-res flat panels. Might as well start planning now.

    In other news (don't feel like starting a whole other post) LCDs look bad at their non-native resolution, and most divide into non-standard screens: 1280x1024/2 = 640x512--who supports that? Or 1024x768 goes to 512x384--that's the same res as a Mac Classic, not even VGA (640x480). We need to make out software smart enough to work in all these scenarios. I'd love to have one of those ViewSonics (they're $7500, btw) but a 640x480 pic on the Web will be the size of a business card. OTOH, I'd *pay* to spend some time working in Illustrator on one--assuming Adobe could grow the pallets to make them visible.

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    1. Re:Not mythical, just expensive by Rob+Simpson · · Score: 2, Interesting
      My Samsuing 191N (1280x1024, 19") has an "image size" option on its menu, which - on non-native resolutions - lets me choose from "normal" (a box in the middle of the screen, good for 1024x768, etc.), "expanded 1" (stretches the screen to the sides, but leaves bars at the top and bottom, good for 640x480), and "expanded 2" (stretches to fullscreen, generally looks crappy). It also remembers this setting for each resolution used.

      Frankly, at LCD prices, I think the monitors should be smart enough to work this sort of thing out. I wouldn't even consider buying an LCD without this feature.

  87. There is no excuse for non-scalable web sites. by Bistronaut · · Score: 1

    It really bugs me when web sites don't scale well with their text. It is not that hard to specify your column widths in ems. Pictures should not be used for text (except as part of a logo).

  88. This affects more than just people with poor visio by pe1chl · · Score: 1

    Recently, I was told by a manager at a major monitor maker that CRTs are phasing out. I have a very weak eye and I read text at 1024x768 on a 21" monitor, sitting 2 feet away. Each alphabet is about 1/4" tall. What makes me panic is the fact that LCDs have fixed resolution and they are simply too small for me to read icons and widget text, like Microsoft's.

    Recently we received a new laptop at work that has 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD. I only use Linux myself and I immediately assumed that it would be easy to configure Windows XP so that all text is bigger, all pictograms are larger, etc. while improving their quality (else one can simply set the resolution to 800x600 which would blow away the advantage of the nice LCD)

    However, this turns out to be not the case, at least as far as I have seen. Even with the large fonts option selected, some text remains really tiny.

    Strange that products are shipped like that...

  89. What about implementing Bicubic scaling? by default+luser · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most LCDs today use some form of Bilinear filtering for scaling down their image, not the greatest.

    One scale-down filter I've been very impressed with is Bicubic, I have used this filter for scaling dozens of photographs, and never has the result looked blurry.

    I'm wondering how much hardware it would take ti implement a real-time Bicubic filter for LCDs...

    --

    Man is the animal that laughs.
    And occasionally whores for Karma.

  90. Resolution independent Toolkit by aashenfe · · Score: 1

    Maybe what would be nice would be a resolution independent toolkit. Maybe QT or GTK could be modified for this. All widget sizes would be specified in distance units such as Centimeters or inches (Programers Choice). No mater what your res was all programs would pop up at their normal size. Then add the ability to do tranformations to the coordinate system on the fly.

    Some nice features could then be added to the desktop. For instance. Miniturizing programs (Mini caculators, text editors, any program) that can still be interacted with, and doesn't require extra programming. A slider could be added to the window manager to scale the app.

    This would probably require hardware acceleration like OS X. But instead of just using it for eye candy, make it usefull.

  91. glasses by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 1

    Some people have vision poor enough that it can only be correctable to a limit.

    I would also bet that anyone with vision that poor (we are talking 1/4" text here) wouldn't mind the scaling problems that a 19" LCD and set it to SVGA or XGA resolutions.

  92. Turn up the font size by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    windows has a setting in the display properties to turn up font sizes

  93. tried it by DrSkwid · · Score: 1

    not that keen tbh

    I prefer Mozilla's interface

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  94. Best Buy has one for $1300 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Saw one yesterday for $1300 - did 1600x1200, looked nice. A spot cheaper than my 21" CRT cost me years ago, I might add. The next CRT that dies around here will be replaced with LCD. -AC

  95. Berlin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is why we need a resolution indepentent windowing system (like Fresco, formerly Berlin, is). It makes zero sense for an increase in resolution to mean a decrease in font size. Stupidly, everything is measured in pixels...

  96. GNOME 2 by Pflipp · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure if this is at all what you want, but GNOME 2 on my Debian unstable (and I believe everywhere else as well) ships with a handful of High Contrast-themes, usually containing higher color contrasts (more towards black & white), including the icons, and huge fonts.

    Again, I'm not sure if that's what you want. I've no sight problem that a small pair of glasses can't solve.

    --
    "We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
  97. Sigh by DGolden · · Score: 1

    This pisses me off too, I've ranted about it for years, there's now quite a few well-written X11 applications that respect DPI settings sufficiently to be pleasant at high DPI, including most KDE/QT applications, thanks to XRENDER - but there's no displays to be had!

    I just wish I could get a 15"-17" 1600x1200 or above LCD monitor that didn't have a non-upgradeable graphics card and PC hanging out of it (laptop) instead of a useful input port. But you just can't buy them as standalone desktop units, at any price (at least from anywhere I've called in Ireland, UK and Germany).

    I'm pretty close to just buying a bigger (and hence lower DPI) LCD screen, and just sitting further away from it, but it's a waste of space.

    BTW, you can manually set your physical display size with DisplaySize x-millimetres y-millimetres in the "Monitor" section of your XF86Config file

    --
    Choice of masters is not freedom.
  98. Re:Hello, McFly by justsomebody · · Score: 1

    I hope you're trying to be funny:). Either that or you never resized resolution on LCD to see difference beetwen fixed and changed resolutions

    --
    Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
  99. Correct me if I'm wrong... by TwistedSquare · · Score: 1

    I admit now I'm not really sure what I'm talking about but I thought TFTs could scale properly (i.e. not just 1 pixel is a clump of 4) to whatever resolution you wanted to set them to? Is this not the case, as I haven't really played with one up close and fiddled the resolution.

  100. stupid, stupid world... by rsilverman · · Score: 1

    It's hard to believe this is an issue in the year 2003. We've had good device-, resolution-independent graphics systems for decades (e.g. Display PostScript, NeWS, etc.). It is an obviously, profoundly stupid thing to do to measure anything for display, at a high level, in units tied to something as hardware-dependent as pixels. And yet, here we are, discussing this problem as if it were some kind of deep technical issue -- and people are afraid to buy better monitors because they have to squint at them, because the software running the displays of the major OS's still makes mistakes we learned how to avoid in the 70's.

    Our species is doomed.

  101. Get a Plasma Display by snookerdoodle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    'Sorry I'm late, and sorry you won't see this, but we got one of our visually impaired employees a Panasonic 50" plasma display. We ran it at the native resolution and he was as happy as a pig in mud.

    Mark

  102. LASIK by maroberts · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what the limits of LASIK correction are nowadays, but have you checked it out recently? Whn mine was done about 3 years ago the limit was about -14 dioptres (my eyesight was -10.25/-9.75), but these things tend to move on.

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

  103. vector graphics by multi+io · · Score: 1

    The generic solution is to use vector-based window systems like NeXT/Quartz (Display PDF) or the window system of the upcoming Windows release "Longhorn"(?). In these systems, the dimensions of all graphics objects are specified in inches/centimeters instead of pixels. The window knows the graphic card's current (pixel-based) resolution and the monitor's DPI resolution and renders all graphics accordingly.

    1. Re:vector graphics by multi+io · · Score: 1
      The window

      system

      knows ...

  104. I dont understand.. by Bruha · · Score: 1

    I've got a 17" Mag LT765 Monitor.

    Res is at 1280x1024 and when I switch over to 1024x768 it's about the demensions he mentions..

    Furthermore you can adjust font sizes in Linux easily for most applications.

    So I'm really not seeing his point here?

  105. Vote with your wallet, plus Linux comment by jetmarc · · Score: 1

    My opinion:

    1. Get a better display, "better" as in "suits your needs". I for one suffer of a similar problem,
    and my solution was to get a 17 1/2 inch display at 1280x1024 instead of those 16 1/2, 16 or even
    15 inch panels that are on the market. The text is noticably better readable.

    2. Forget about Linux on LCD. I've never seen anything worse. It provides nice options, and lets
    you choose between several rendering tricks - it even asks about the R,G,B pixel ordering on your
    panel. However, the text still looks blurry and is difficult to read. Using linux for more than
    30 minutes gives me a headache. I prefer to login from the win32 machine (connected to the SAME
    display!) via ssh and do the work from there. I think this is related to the lack of bitmapped
    fonts on linux. But honestly, nobody could help me resolve this issue so far. As soon as I
    mention the (IMHO obivous) problem on irc or usenet, I'm drowned in the usual advocacy about how
    superiour scalable rendered fonts are.

    Marc

  106. or: What you want is Display Postscript by David+Rolfe · · Score: 1
    The 'svg' in ui concept is an itch that's already been scratched. What we 'need' is for our popular tk's and apps and wm's based around them to just use display postscript too.

    What I see in this thread is lots of reinventing the wheel. The concept of resolution independance has been floating around in UI theory for YEARS and has already been implemented in OSX. If anything OSS is exceptionally well suited to 'reverse engineering' something like a display postscript scheme, rather than starting from scratch with the vector graphics format du jour.

    Also the more fluid widget layouts would help this too, as in Tk forms that are "packed" and not "placed".

    --
    Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
  107. Eh? by Telastyn · · Score: 1

    Have things changed without me noticing them? I mean, I have pretty good vision; 20/20 corrected, and use 1024x768 on a 21" CRT [albeit around 3-feet away]. Anything less I find cumbersome and straining after about 3-4 hours.

    Am I one of the only ones to notice?
    Do others take more breaks?

    I'm not sure. Maybe I take more notice of it, and am more wary given the fact my father's eyesight has deteriorated steadily after 25+ years in front of a CRT.

    And for the original poster: don't worry, CRTs still have their place and will be around for probably the rest of anyone's current lifetime.

  108. Eject the CD right now, dammit!" BRILLIANT by pg--az · · Score: 2, Funny

    Rebooting my Windows to eject the CD is SO tiresome - I had not known this was also still so with Mac and Linux. Enlightening, thanks !

  109. Control of system font size/resolution in Windows by rochlin · · Score: 1
    In Windows XP (and I believe 2000 and 98), if you look under the Display Properties control panel and double-click on your display icon (e.g. the big square with a 1 in the middle), you ought to get access for the settings for your display driver. Under the "General" tab it is standard (though a few manufacturers override it) to include "DPI settings" which is intended EXACTLY for the purpose you are seeking.

    "If your screen resolution makes screen items too small to view comfortably, you can increase the DPI to cmpensate. To change font sizes only, click Cancel and go to the Appearance tab". Mine is set to "large size (120 DPI)" to accommodate 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor nicely.

  110. Re: make it work in Mac OS X by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

    Following your suggestions, I turned on the zoom feature. It's very pixelated, although I can't say the same will be true of a Quartz extreme display. What's more, the anti-aliasing is now quite distracting.

  111. Xinerama by SEWilco · · Score: 1

    Well, you could set a bunch of LCD panels next to each other and use Xinerama to use the whole wall as your computer display.

  112. medical imaging by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I work in medical imaging research. As such I spend a good bit of time looking at the most miniscule details of images. I find it terribly fatiquing to use LCD's because of the quantization. On a good analog monitor (think 21" trinitron or mitsubishi at 1600x1200) the channels get blurred just enough so that grey scale images render as, well, grey. On a 21" LCD places where images have strong gradients are color shifted and the direction of the shift depends on the direction of the gradient -- that is there's a color ghosting. Also, I agree M$ windows at 1600x1200 is hard to read. Gnome and KDE aren't too bad.

  113. Your XF86Config and FVWM2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    For Redhat, Mandrake and Debian Linux users:
    I use fvwm and set it up to make it easy to see and use. Here's a screenshot.

    Not shown in the screenshot is the menu, which I have set to yellow, with black text, very easy to see.
    Here is the section in my .fvwm2rc for the font:
    # large font menu
    #MenuStyle * Font 12x24
    # medium font menu
    MenuStyle * Font 10x20

    I suppose one could adjust your /etc/XF86Config to run the size (1024x768, etc) and bpp ( 16, 24, 32) that you can get your graphics card to run) and try that with your LCD monitor.
    Some of my .fvwm2rc files are here.

    Personal Opinion Section: Can't see how the liquid - crystal monitors can be as clear as a CRT, however, they are just the same as laptop screens, and a lot of us would not want to spend a lot of time using that kind of screen. Could make it do, however, if for instance one were to win one in a 50 cent raffle or something. Can't see paying hundreds of dollars for one.

    1. Re:Your XF86Config and FVWM2 by Alex+Belits · · Score: 1

      Personal Opinion Section: Can't see how the liquid - crystal monitors can be as clear as a CRT, however, they are just the same as laptop screens, and a lot of us would not want to spend a lot of time using that kind of screen.

      They are not the same. Laptop screens are designed to keep the power consumption low. Desktop panels do not have this limitation.

      --
      Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
  114. Reading Glasses by MikePontillo · · Score: 1

    I have pretty good eyes (close to 20/20 vision) but one thing that really helped me is when my vision plan kicked in -- I went to the optometrist and picked up a pair of prescription reading glasses. Reading glasses have helped reduce my daily dose of eye strain enormously.

  115. Window resolution by thromigal · · Score: 2, Informative

    Cliff, If you use Mozilla as your browser (as I do in Red Hat 8.0), you can simply type in Ctrl+ as many times to change the font size on the fly. Or type Ctrl- to reduce the font. I use this all the time and it suits me very well. Therefore, Linux already seems to be ahead of the curve here. Of course, this is not a generic fix, but a browser level fix, but thats where one tends to do most of one's reading (I guess). Hope this helps. cheers

  116. Re:Control of system font size/resolution in Windo by Big_Breaker · · Score: 1

    It may be a Windows tip but it deserves to be bumped.

    My mother can't use anything but windows and has eye trouble. Changing the DPI was a godsend for her.

  117. oh yeah, thanks by DrSkwid · · Score: 1

    someone in the world has a brain

    I'm pretty sure it isn't me

    oh btw. Flamebait ?

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    1. Re:oh yeah, thanks by xtrucial · · Score: 1

      oh btw. Flamebait ?

      *shrug* Since pretty much anyone with a little karma can moderate, the moderation doesn't make sense at times (i.e. people don't make sense sometimes). Maybe said moderator didn't like your honest assessment of IE. I agree with you, though; coding for browsers that don't adhere to standards is a pain.

  118. You could always by mduell · · Score: 1

    Go into display properties and tell windows you have a higher dpi monitor, and it will scale all the fonts accordingly. Or lie and set it to even higher dpi than you really have to get even bigger fonts.

    This seems to be one of those lame I'm-too-lazy-to-learn-how-to-do-it-in-XP-so-I'll-b ash-XP-and-ask-for-a-linux-solution-that-doesn't-e xist ask slashdots...

  119. glasses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    buy some new glasses??????????

  120. liquidview and stuff by cosyne · · Score: 1

    So one product to look into for windows is LiquidView. (wow, free advertising on /. just for shipping copies with nec panels. clever bastards.)

    The other thing which can help is the appearance tab in Windows's Display Settings.

    Having said that, I don't think CRTs are going to be phased out that fast. Looking around online, I see a 21 inch sony crt for $762, running 2048 x 1536. Then I find a 21 inch samsung lcd which only does 1600 x 1200, for $1422. Even with shipping, you're still paying around 3x as much per pixel.

    Also, how often do you really need to read the menu font? So long as Mozilla scales up the fonts in the documents I'm reading, I don't mind if the title bars and menus and such are small. I know where they are, and what they do. On the off chance I really have to read one I can lean in closer.

    But on the other hand, OSX-type magnification would be friggin cool, especially if you could just trigger it with the 4th mouse button (and maybe adjust the degree with the scroll wheel).

  121. Go Digital by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you go with a digital video card and an LCD monitor with a digital input the problem goes away.

  122. Re:This affects more than just people with poor vi by Large+Green+Mallard · · Score: 1

    If you use a 1600x1200 LCD display at 800x600, it should just double the number of physical pixels each virtual pixel uses and shouldn't look too bad.

  123. I'd like to whine about this too.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First I'm an AC; too bad.
    Second I'd like to say I'm a professional programmer who is really fed up with accessability issues.
    I run "big fonts" on my windows setup, and I get gruff from that from my fellow workers. But WTF?!?!? Shouldn't the computer adapt to the user!?!?! I don't miss an opportunity to bitch to my colleagues about our company's use of web style sheets that cement the font size to something I find too small. Arrgggh. you should _always_ be able to adjust the font size up and down in the browser-- oh yeah, forgot to mention it is a web based product.

  124. I already do what you want... by steveha · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...and I do it under Linux.

    I have a classic, wonderful monitor: an SGI 1600sw, with 1600x1024 resolution. I only run it in its native resolution. My fonts are large and beautiful.

    0) Use TrueType fonts.

    Make sure your X11 setup is all correct for scaled fonts, especially TrueType fonts, and then get some good ones. Go everywhere and make sure you are using your good TrueType fonts. My GNOME preference fonts are all TrueType, plus my web browsers. The GNOME 2.x dialog for this is Applications / Desktop Preferences / Font. If you have an LCD flat panel display, be sure to check the box that says "Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)". For a CRT monitor, I suggest you check the "Best shapes" box.

    1) Grow your fonts.

    Go into XF86Config (or, in Debian, XF86Config-4 if you are using a recent version of XFree86). Find the part where it describes the monitor. There should be a DisplaySize line describing how big your monitor is, in millimeters. If the line is not there, search the web for specs on your monitor, or just measure it, and add the DisplaySize line. For the 1600sw:

    DisplaySize 369.4 236.4

    Now we want to lie to X11 about the size of our monitor, and say it's smaller than it really is. I want fonts 150% the usual size, so I multiply each number by 100/150 (i.e. 2/3 or 0.66666).

    DisplaySize 246.3 157.6 # lie to get 150% font zoom (165 dpi)

    # DisplaySize 369.4 236.4 # correct: 1600x1024 at 110dpi

    Note that I like to leave comments about what the heck I'm doing here and why.

    Now, X11 thinks my monitor is 165 DPI, instead of the real 110 DPI. When an application asks X11 to display 12 point text, X11 scales the TrueType font accordingly. I get automatic, across-the-board font zoom.

    Peeve: there ought to be an X11 setting for this. You ought to be able to specify a zoom level, say 150%, and have X11 honor it without bastardizing the monitor size. If I can't have a zoom level setting, at least let us specify the DPI as a DPI number, instead of as the number of millimeters our monitors are!

    2) Grow your web fonts too

    Now your other big problem will be web sites that hard-code sizes. Even with 150% zoom, you really don't want 6-point fonts. The "minimum font size" setting in Mozilla hasn't worked well for me when I tried it in the past. You can specify a horrid large font size in the prefs, but then when you print a page, it prints huge too!

    The solution is to use a cascading style sheet (.css) file. Go to your ~/.mozilla/default/<something>/chrome directory, and edit a file called userContent.css. (Be sure to check out the example files that Mozilla leaves there for you, while you are there!)

    Add these lines to userContent.css and save:

    @media screen {
    * {
    font-size: 28px !important;
    line-height: 30px !important;
    }
    }

    These lines mean: only for display on the screen (not while printing!), set the font size to 28 pixels height, and the line height to 30 pixels height. The "!important" part means you insist, even if the web page specifies a smaller size.

    Now revel in the easier-to-read text.

    You still have problems. Web designers who lay out pages with tiny fonts didn't expect their fonts to be forced huge, so the page won't look right; it might look downright ugly. And this fix does nothing to help when the webmaster specified a column width in pixels, so you may find a column that was intended to be over half your screen width is actually only three inches wide! (Thus you have big, easy-to-read text in a skinny very tall column, and you have to scroll the page a lot to read it.)

    You also may find some text-entry forms that are 6 points tall, but the text you are typing into them is still huge, so you can't really read it. I ought to figure out what preference sets minimum text-entry box size.

    Anyone with more useful tips, please share them!

    P.S. Slashdot would not let me include the lines from my config files

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  125. Nothing wrong with using /. as an intelligent agen by Inoshiro · · Score: 1

    It saves time, and generates a greater wealth of answers than most people. Plus, by solving the question in a public forum, you educate more people than you would be solving it yourself.

    Just imagine where we'd be if everyone on the planet would have to go from first principles to kinematics on their own before they reached the age of 17. Pure insanity.

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
  126. Apple, Windows, Linux by theolein · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I recently had to give my Dell Inspiron 8200 back to my ex employer, and was quite happy about it for the reason that the display had such a high native resolution. 1600x1200@15". While one can adjust the DPI setting in the display properties box, and the result is ok for most windows software, there are many programmes that have either hard coded widget text (Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop palettes are non standard Win32 controls and therefore remain absolutely tiny, making it very difficult to use the programmes on that display) or have poor absolute size widget layouts or fixed window sizes esuring that the widgets are cut off or not visible (Corel Capture preferences dialog box is one).

    For a windows laptop I will in future look for laptops with a much lower native resolution if possible (1400x1000@15" or even lower if the manufacturer has it)

    I find X11 based systems to be difficult to configure (but not impossible) but the graphic quality on LCD's always seems to be a bit behind the current generation of Windows or Macintosh OS's. The fonts often seem either rough edged or blurred or both.

    The most reasonable quality native resolution LCD displays that I've used are the Apple ones, as Apple seems to have kept the native resolutions lower compared to PC's. The 15" display on my G4 Laptop has a native resolution of 1152x768@15" and is much easier to work with and gives me far less eye strain. I don't know whether Apple does this to cut costs (cheaper than higher resolution displays) or if this is simply good design, but it does offer me more comfort in working on my machine with a (for me) better resolution.

    1. Re:Apple, Windows, Linux by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 1

      Huh?

      "as Apple seems to have kept the native resolutions lower compared to PC's"

      You can buy plenty of 15" PC notebooks with a 1024x768 LCD display. Dell sells them, HP sells them. You can even find them at Best Buy or Fry's. Heck, most PC laptops use XGA resolution.

      "The fonts often seem either rough edged or blurred or both."

      Use GNOME2 or KDE2/3. They both have good antialiasing support.

  127. don't forget you can chage the font size. by Ernest · · Score: 1


    By selecting a sutable font size (big), you will be able to see quite wel on any resolution.

    I know of managers you dumpt there beautiful portable for a less nice one because of the resolution that was set too high. Not thinking they could change the font size too.

    --
    Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
  128. Jews in space by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They'd be driving starships, as per "History of the World, Part I."

  129. The problem with glasses by AllenChristopher · · Score: 1

    If you aren't wearing them, it's very difficult to find them. This has nothing to do with monitors, but it's a major design flaw. They need to beep or something.

  130. Gnome LargePrint themes by Daverz · · Score: 1

    You might try one of the Gnome LargePrint themes. These are designed for "accessibilty", i.e. for the vision impaired.

  131. If Necessary, Wave The Law At Them by reallocate · · Score: 1

    Sounds like you aren't this far down the road, but your employer needs to take some responsibility to provide you with a display that you can actually read.

    If your employer balks, and if you're in the States, wave the Americans With Disabilities Act at them. IANAL, but I think it is clear that you cannot be placed in a position of not being able to perform your work duties satisfactorily simply because your employer wants to buy a particular brand of monitor.

    --
    -- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
  132. Thanks, everyone! by BerntB · · Score: 1
    This was informative. It might make my life better.

    I've bookmarked this and will reread it once every few weeks for ideas. (No, I didn't post the question.)

    --
    Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
  133. Wrong thread! :-) by BerntB · · Score: 1

    Sorry.

    --
    Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
  134. Computers by Redbw6 · · Score: 1

    I think that you have something! Of course elders aren't going to enjoy computers that don't have large enough font, so I think that you should go with your idea and start a line of computers specifically designed for those who have poor eyesight.