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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.
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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.
This is the perfect opportunity to invent some sort of magnifying device...Yes..it should be portable and light. I'll call it glasses.
YAFIRL (Yet another Free iPods referral link)
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
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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.
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.
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.
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
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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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.