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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!
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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.
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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.
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..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
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.
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 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?
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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.
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.
The long-term trend in displays is to decouple capture/creation resolution from storage/transport resolution from display resolution.
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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.
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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>
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Not to mention all the people in their twenties with poor eyesite already...
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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...
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'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
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 !
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
...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
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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.