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?"
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.
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
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
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.
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
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).
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?
The coolest voice ever.
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.
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
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 :-)
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
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
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.
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
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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:
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.
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
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.
'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.