Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!)
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
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.
The long-term trend in displays is to decouple capture/creation resolution from storage/transport resolution from display resolution.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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>
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!
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.
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.
.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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
"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."
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.