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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?"
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!
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
Use a magnifying glass! ;)
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).
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
..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.
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
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
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.
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'.
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!)
This is the perfect opportunity to invent some sort of magnifying device...Yes..it should be portable and light. I'll call it glasses.
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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.
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
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.
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.
Letter To Iran
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.
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)
:-)
/. after all.
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
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.
Using XP, but it's almost the same on 2000 and NT:
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.
Does this mean that we will soon see cheapo monitor liquidations?? I sure hope so.
Many Thanks,
Luke
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.
The long-term trend in displays is to decouple capture/creation resolution from storage/transport resolution from display resolution.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
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.
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>
"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
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
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
Control panel / Display / Appearance, adjust the Font Size combo-box.
What's the problem?
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
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)
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..
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
...get reading glasses?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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..
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.
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
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).
...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!
Not until LCDs can display colors as well as CRTs, you won't find many LCDs being used by anyone who does professional graphics.
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
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!"
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.
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?
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
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.
1.)Hold Ctrl down on the keyboard
2.)Roll the mouse wheel forward to zoom
3.)Sit back an read
Thanks
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!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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
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.
/etc/X11/Xresources to
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
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
ViewSonic has a 200 DPI 22.2" display, 3840x2400.d _vp2290b.htm )
(http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lc
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.
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).
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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]
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.
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
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.
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.
'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
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
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.
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".
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?
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
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.
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.
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 !
"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.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
b ash-XP-and-ask-for-a-linux-solution-that-doesn't-e xist ask slashdots...
This seems to be one of those lame I'm-too-lazy-to-learn-how-to-do-it-in-XP-so-I'll-
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.
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).
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.
...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
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.
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.
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
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.
You might try one of the Gnome LargePrint themes. These are designed for "accessibilty", i.e. for the vision impaired.
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"
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...:-( )
Sorry.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
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.