Slashdot Mirror
What Font Color Is Best For Eyes?
juraj writes "What font color and what background is best for the eyes, when you work for a long time? I have found various contradictory recommendations and I wonder if you know about any medical studies on this topic."
Yellow on red seems like a very popular high contrast color combination for several years.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Background :#FFFFFF
Text: #FFFF00
You are now manually breathing.
I've been saying this for years, but no-one's paying attention, apparently...
When you work with computers for long periods of time, the colour of the font is nothing compared with taking regular breaks. Look out the window. Go for a walk. Make some tea. Bump up the font size. Get a bigger monitor and put it further away.
You are focusing on a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of the problem. There are almost certainly a ton of ways in which you could reduce eyestrain by gigantic amounts in comparison without bothering with something as trivial as font colour.
Like my porn, it's black on white.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
Black background; font in black.
You know what? Just turn the monitor off and go look at something with depth-of-field.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Brightness is the best control for eye strain. I usually lower the brightness to it's minimum and adjust the contrast accordingly. Less light lowers the strain to me.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Like here.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Green on Black
Green is right in the middle of our visible spectrum which makes it the easiest for our eyes to pick up.
As for which is healthiest for the eyes, probably listening to an audio-book version of the same text...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
There are so many variables to this.
- What medium are we referring to? CRT monitor, LCD monitor, printed matt page, Hi-gloss paper?
- How much ambient light is there?
- What type of ambient light is there? Incandescent, fluorescent, halogen...?
- What is 'a long time'?
- Who are we talking about? A 7 year old child, a 30 year old office worker, a 50 year old proof reader...?
Answer those questions and we won't all be shooting in the dark.The Mothership
... then shake the monitor.
What is "best" will clearly depend upon what criteria you consider. Are you talking about a combination that is teh least likely to lead to damage to the eyes, the combination which causes least pain while reading, or the combination that is most comfortable? Does psychological factors count? Is your userbase young, old, mixed? I would imagine the answer could differ depending on these cases.
The only thing I can tell for certain is that the claim that looking at black on white text on a screen is like starring into a light bulb is complete nonsense, and it is very easily confirmed that the two are nowhere near the same by simply looking into a light bulb ( thou it is probably best to limit such experiments in order not to damage your eyes ). While your pupils can somewhat adjust for the incoming light, starring into a light bulb at short distance will almost certainly overwhelm your eyes with light, while looking at the computer screen does not.
The fact that a computer screen emits light does not in itself mean it will be "brighter" than a paper. It can as an example be very difficult to read some LCD screens outdoors because the relatively faint light they emit is completely drowned by bright sunlight reflected off it's surface. Now, while it may or may not be true that it is "not good" to have all light coming from only one place in front of you (which would appears to suggest having a lit computer screen in a dark room is bad ), this could be easily avoided by simply adjusting the surrounding illumination and screen brightness, and I find it very doubtful that there is much a web designer can do to optimise his webpage for every single situation since users will change the brightness and contrast of their monitors.
As a pure guess, I would imagine that weather your color scheme is familiar, if your font is large enough, and the reader's "taste" has a much greater impact than most physiological effects, and thus I would recommend a black on white color scheme with a clear simple font of sufficient size. Most people find it acceptable, and there is as far as I know little evidence that it should be troublesome.
The human eye is naturally lazy, and likes to look at things that do not cause it to send strong signals. To that end, a black background is essential for "easy on the eyes" formatting. From there, pretty much any light colour can be use for the text.
When I was in uni, I used to buy special black paper "visual arts diaries" and write my class notes using a gold, silver, bronze, or plain white ink pen. This had the effect of making my pretty poor handwriting easier to read for most people, and also reducing the effects of my dyslexia; I would make less errors like inverting a series of numbers as I wrote them down and the like.
For different working environment, e.g. with different "general background" color/brightness, you may need different color combination.
Well, nothing could prevent the eyes' fatigue if you keep on looking at the screen too long.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The parent is correct. Calibration of a monitor can help nicely too as described in this post: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21627&cid=2302809 as slashdot covered this exact topic quite a lont time ago: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/14/1516207
meep
...because none of us have RTFA - as there isn't one.
I have found various contradictory recommendations...Err, that's nice. Where's the links?
The Mothership
I'll chime in as a physician.
:p
I always wondered in medical school what causes eyestrain -- your mom probably told you "don't read in poor light," but since the photons are easily sufficient to give an image on your retina, this didn't make sense to me.
It turns out that your eye muscles have a difficult time obtaining a rapid and precise focus with poor light, which gives less contrasts on the edges that are detected for sharp focus. In low light conditions, the eye muscles are rapidly focusing back and forth, and these micro-contractions can fatigue them similar to the other large muscles of your body. As an analogy, imagine walking on level ground versus on a balance beam. You are constantly contracting different adjustment muscles to walk on a balance beam, using more energy and promoting fatigue.
So, in answer to your question, you would want a high-contrast color scheme to make it easy for your eyes to focus on the letters. "Duh," I hear you say.
Next, I would recommend minimizing the difference in brightness between your monitor and the outside environment and its background. That is, in a dark office have a dark monitor, and in a bright office, a bright one. Why? Well, same reason -- your eye muscles have to dilate your pupil every time you look away from a bright monitor to a dark monitor. More contractions / adjustments -> more fatigue. Not only that, but the high brightness contrast will give ineffective normalization of light across the eye receptors and could cause headache.
Regarding your study question -- difficult to fund, and difficult to accomplish. I guess you would have to divide several hundred office workers, and try to have them work the same hours under same conditions with different fonts, and then ask a subjective question regarding symptoms. It could be done, but I am not sure of any well-performed efforts that have addressed this question.
In summary, I would just choose contrasting colors that you like or find subjectively pleasing, and then keep the brightness on your monitor appropriate for ambient lighting. Also, don't forget to focus on the numerous other ergonomic factors on your workstation. I see a *lot* of people with bad backs from the workplace, but there are a lot of 80 year old secretaries that are not blind.
Cue the contempt for expertise from the anti-intellectual crowd now.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
My first reaction to this was "what would Edward Tufte do?"
I found the following link discussing the topic: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000M0&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E.T.
The article discussed the best is a dark background with a bright font, but the conversation seemed to be too "environmental" as it it depends on the viewers local light setting instead of being generally independent of any local lighting.
What if I am "forced" to operate using a light/bright background and darker contrasting font?
In my opinion, experience, and local preference I have found dark grey font as easy on my eyes. It is my opinion but I do a lot of reading online with many fonts.
Just look on myspace, then do the exact oppersite.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There is no best set of "colors" for foreground/background, as evidenced by conflicting studies which tried to determine what that set was. Rather, what's important is contrast between the colors so that you can easily distinguish what you're seeing. So long as you maintain contrast, the choice of the specific colors is entirely subjective and up to you.
I'm totally with you, except the other way around. Green text on black background works great for me, feels like an old-school terminal. Especially great when I'm coding late at night when the lights are off.
The CB App. What's your 20?
If you stare at text all day long, I've found that high contrast (black on white default) and high color saturation (brightly colored syntax highlighting) is very tiring. Turning both down a notch goes a long way for extending readability.
My terminals all use a light white on dark grey scheme, and my preferred vim color scheme has been ps_color for quite a while. (here's a useful site for visually comparing a ton of color schemes (in iframes) all at once: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/. )
Power to the Peaceful
Gray is a color, grey is a colour.
Infrared on ultraviolet
ColorBrewer http://www.colorbrewer.org/ has some of the answers. It will tell you about how well human eyes will be able to discern a colour scheme on various devices. It won't say much about the effect of staring at a particular colour scheme for hours.
I loved my 21" Eizo greyscale monitor. As a monochrome monitor, it had no colour gun registration issues and the text was razor sharp. It also supported 1600 x 1200 at a time when most people aspired to own a 1024 x 768 17" CRT. That is, the design and quality of the output device is also important for long term eye friendliness.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Call me old, but I've always preferred Grey lettering on a Navy background ala Word Perfect 5.1. At least when working on documents where graphics and colors are unimportant. I still keep Word configured that way to today. People accustomed to Black on White think I'm weird(er) for using it that way.
Or when I'm using a terminal, I usually setup a Green on Black color scheme, but Amber text would also be nostalgic. Even a shade of Grey on Black for an alternate nostalgia. SunOS was Black on Grey
My question(s) to you, what are you working on? Is it code? In an IDE or xterm? Do you have multi-color themes, like in an IDE? Or graphic design with lots of colors at once, in which a medium grey is usually standard? Working in a brightly lit, fluorescent bulb cubicle, an office with natural light, a basement with incandescent lights, or a dark room lit only by the neon/led/ccd bulbs of your case mods? These variables could effect your decision as much as anything else.
I think the best way for you to figure it out 'scientifically' is to come up with 5-10 combinations, try them each day at work for 1-2 weeks, and record your thoughts in a journal every hour or so. "Is this comfortable to look at? How's my eye strain? Can I reliably read what I'm doing? etc." Then pick your 2 favorites and try them each for a week straight, again making notes. Then decide on one. You can find what works for you over the long hours. I'm certain that my preference is different from yours. Obviously, you'll need to pick colors with higher contrast to each other, as Lime Green text on a Lemon Yellow background would probably be a difficult setting to get much done in.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Second that. I use a light blue/teal/green/gray on black/dark gray for all my coding. My supervisor hates it cause it's hard for him to read, but that's not why I do it. It's just easier for me to read blue/green on black. I rarely use red hues unless I need to notify myself of something (coding errors, etc.)
I just wish it was easier to select a "dark format" desktop and have everything read my local system settings for colors. I tried at one time, but I got so sick of web pages with white images for backgrounds disturbing my dark reading bliss.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Yellow, becuase your eye is built to see the light of the sun
This will evidently come as a surprise to you, but the light of the sun is WHITE. That's why we call it "white light".
I seriously I always thought, Word Perfect's old combination white on blue was the result of such sort of study, and was included in Word for several years.
I normally try to set my windows to either white (or gray) on blue (or black). I increase the bright of the foreground depending of how light is the background (i.e. if I use light blue for background, I put white as foreground, but I use gray if the background is dark blue or black, the reason to pick each, depends on the flexibility of the editor for modifying colors when they have sintax highlight).
When determining the "ideal" text colors for a website, one needs to take into account that many people have color blindless.
Furthermore, simply choosing contrasting colors won't work - ie. red on green is bad, red on blue is bad, etc.
With that said, some of the color combos mentioned, such as black/white or green/black often work well - easy to read by most all people.
Ron
For xterms,
green on black
black on wheat
white on navy
cyan on black
orange on black
I use white on navy for emacs.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
That font usually sends me into an epileptic seizure resulting in a day off work.
So, based on your medical expertise, you are saying if it hurts when I do X, I shouldn't do X?
Well, it's better than this.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Your screen is dark. your text is likely to be eaten by a grue.
The CB App. What's your 20?
indeed. it's insane how many CRT monitors are still operating at 60Hz when almost ALL of the hardware being used today is capable of higher rates.
For some of us with sensitive vision, looking at a 60Hz screen is like reading text written on a strobe light. Even if it doesn't subjectively bother you, it does cause increased eye strain. Apparently even OSHA cautions against 60Hz.
A good document on this issue ( show it to your librarian, IT pro, or whoever has locked you out of the control panel) is available here: http://www.nhpa.org/docs/ComputerMonitorFlicker.doc
ôó
You are on the right track but there is more. Yes, higher contrast is better than lower contrast. But how this works with color is complicated.
One big issue is that the eye is not perfect optically. It cannot focus all colors at the same focal plane. Just how well it does varies by individual and the optical conditions of their eyes, and the quality of corrective lenses (which usually make it worse with respect to the ability to simultaneously focus all colors).
An important factor to consider here is which color or colors the difference is at the edge being focused on. For example in the "hot dog" pattern that has been mentioned in a reply here, the difference is actually in green. If the red level of the yellow part is exactly the same as the level of the pure red part, then all the difference is in green and this is an issue of green contrast. Yellow on red like this is essentially the same as green on black ... except that the extra red light with yellow on red causes the iris to close down more than the darker green on black would.
I find blue to be the worst to focus with. That may be because my sources of blue light are not sufficiently narrow band in the spectrum. Being spread out over the spectrum, it basically comes in fuzzy. Blue is also lower in contrast.
Green (be it green on black or yellow on red or even cyan on blue) is better.
Red seems to be the best in terms of focusing a sharp defining edge. You get red contrast with red on black or yellow on green or magenta on blue.
Unfortunately, effective contrast goes down when extra light is added in other colors. So you have to find a balance trading off the sharpness of the edge vs. the contrast. I've found a good compromise in orange on dark green (the level of green in the orange is the same value as the green background). Think of the orange in a neon sign on the green felt of a pool table. Then when I need to highlight something, I shift over to pink on cyan ... basically add the same level of some blue to both the orange and the dark green.
A related issue is light quality when reading a book or newspaper. Usually we are stuck with black letters on white paper. The consideration is then what type of light. I find that incandescent light, or sunlight, works nearly best for me for long term reading. Fluorescent lighting is worse. Ironically, I find high pressure sodium vapor light is about as good as, and sometimes somewhat better than, incandescent light.
To understand this, look at the spectrum. Incandescent light has a fairly even level through all light wavelengths. This makes those black on white edges a bit fuzzy. But fluorescent light has two narrowband peaks at a red and green wavelength (the blue is broader). This can make the text edge sharper ... twice. The eye ends up with two contrast edges. I believe this increases the eyestrain by causing the focus to be constantly jumping in and out to alternate the focus on the two different edges. It's a very small adjustment, but it is there at least for me. With incandescent light, it just settles in the middle of the fuzzy range and doesn't change much. And this is affected by how much light there is, which dictates how small the iris becomes. Higher light levels with a smaller iris won't change the effect from fluorescent as much as for incandescent, since with fluorescent the two contrast edges are already rather sharp due to the two narrowband spectral peaks. But for incandescent, the high light level helps (up to the point that intensity is too stressful).
This is why I believe we still need to keep some incandescent lighting around for reading and other close/fine work for long periods of time. I get a headache when working on things I need to look at closely when doing so under fluorescent light. The onset is about 25 to 45 minutes. I don't get the headaches under incandescent. And I have verified that the flicker is not the cause. White LEDs
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yellow on Dark Blue. Especially for terminals and editors.
- - Bright yellow crisp mono spaced fonts on a dark blue background. This is great for long work hours without sucking your eyes out of the sockets.
- - Bright white on dark blue. Same reasons. These two combinations, combined with white or yellow on black for highlights, make a good simple combination.
- - For low-light conditions, such as an emap in a car, go with the traditional green on black or amber on black. Amber is prettier but harder to focus on quickly when glancing. Green is definately better. The current mapping systems with bright backgrounds are only good for daytime driving. The brightness of the screen causes temporary night-blindness when glancing back and forth at night.--very dangerous--
- - For modern web and client app interfaces, good contrast without major glare is important.
- - Bright blues are pretty, but are painful to a large percent of the population when exposed over long periods. It has something to do with the monitor focal point regarding blue light. Ask an expert on this.
- - Use semi-bright backgrounds, but not glaring. Muted (not primary) pastels with a crisp font are good. Examples include "dusty" pinks/salmons or dusty greens, yellows, warm blue-grays serve as good majority backgrounds where whites (unless muted) should only be used for highlights.
- - You need to make the fonts crisp and readable. Contrast the colors without causing the "spectral blur" that make it look like a "rainbow" on the edges. It may be a cool effect, but it causes eye strain.
- - Compliment the colors with the expected environment spectrum. An office typically has cool (read cheep) fluorescent lighting and drab office colors. Use a warmer set here. For a home application, use cooler colors due to the typically warmer environment. The contrast is more appealing.
- - Just as you contrast the colors with the environment, compliment the hue and brightness. A bright area should have a bright screen to match where a low light area should have a darker interface to reduce eye strain.
Generally, it takes some practice and a lot of input. Some things are often overlooked. A good example is flashing colors, images, or fonts. Just don't do it. These cause huge eye strain and can even cause epileptic seizures. Layout, also is usually an afterthought. This was just as true back when all computers were dumb terminals attached to a mainframes. Most programmers just stink as designers. Clearly delineated layouts are ***ALMOST*** as important as the color scheme. Remember the old timers' rule of thumb. If a novice computer user who knows nothing of the business background for the application can easily explain to you what the application is for and how to use it, then, and only then, it's a good interface.While you joke about red on yellow, I personally use a three color font system that is brown stokes infilled with a pale orange sitting on a white background. It's very legible as you can see in this example here
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Legge, G.E. (2007). Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision . Mahwah , NJ & London : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-4328-0
http://vision.psych.umn.edu/groups/gellab/Categories.htm
http://www.lighthouse.org/accessibility/ for accessibility issues
There is quite a bit of literature on this question. However, badly crafted studies often turn out to be measuring preference not performance. You won't find badly crafted studies in the work of Legge, those who cite him, and those who publish in the same venues.
The fonts in mac Leopard have gone from being pure shades of grey or pigment to polychomatic blends. Your eye reads them as a single color but the blend has a much less jagged appearance.
You can see an example here
Standing across the room and looking at the blow ups on that page I linked to two things are apparent. 1) you can't see the colors and 2) the color one looks more uniform (look at the upper part of the C) and more bold (look at the leg and curve of the R).
My guess is this. You can have more bold if you use colors because if two letters are adjacent in grey then a dark grey bold would bleed together but on these letters red is on the left and blue on the right so dark red and dark blue still have a contrast.
In the eye the ganglia are set up to sharpen edges of contrasting regions. So my guess is that this principle works for the cones as well as the rods meaning that the contrast between the red and blue separation is enhanced even if they have the same grey level.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Calm down Nick, there's no need to get personal! (Although, I do suspect that's exactly why he posted as AC)
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
...In fact, I still use yellow text on blue background for my IDEs ;-)
Dude, it's just sub-pixel rendering. In the Windows world they call it "ClearType" or something like that. And it only works for LCDs, because their color pixels are spatially separated.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Text - background polarity affects performance irrespective of ambient illumination and colour contrast.
and
A study of reading time and viewers' preferences for a variety of combinations of character-background chromaticity for small traditional Chinese characters.
but don't let me do all your clicking for you:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=legibility+of+color+combinations+on+screen&spell=1
If you read the follow up you'll see that that is not a feature of Leopard, but the result of sub-pixel rendering. It's a technique for making text look better on LCDs.
Steve Gibson has an interesting article on it here:
http://www.grc.com/ct/ctwhat.htm
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
First, there's no reason that the frame rate of your video system would be directly related to either the refresh rate of the display or the rate at which it flickers unless you deliberately input data with alternating light/dark frames. LCDs and DLPs typically have internal refresh rates in the 40 Hz to 120 Hz range, and don't have a significant refresh-related flicker in the first place (instead they have backlighting-related flicker in the 100+ Hz range and/or color-wheel related strobing, which isn't quite flicker but also bothers some people). And you certainly don't have a full-color video CRT running at 24 Hz.
Beside that, it's a little silly to talk about "below X Hz" as though the amount of flicker was related only the to the vertical refresh rate and not say, the display type. Even if you limit your discussion to monitor-quality CRTs you still have to consider the persistence of the phosphor. I know it's not a spec that's easy to find, but it's an important part of monitor performance if you're sensitive to flicker.
Multi-sync monitors typically have low-persistence phosphors that allow you to run ridiculously high refresh rates. But that property actually increases the amount of flicker at lower refresh rates, essentially requiring you to run the display faster. Fixed-sync displays (or those with a more limited sync range) have very little refresh-related flicker, because the phosphor persistence in designed to match the vertical refresh rate.
For an easy to produce example, compare a static image on a multi-sync monitor running at 60 Hz vertical refresh to a similar image on a CRT TV -- the TV has much long persistence and much less flicker at low vertical refresh rates.
It's quite possible to design a tube with a low vertical refresh rate without introducing significant amounts of flicker. It's just not possible to run that tube at 180 Hz, and it's easy for people to believe higher number == better product there's been some push to increase the refresh rate in monitors, regardless of what it actually does for performance in the 80 Hz - 100 Hz range that most people will actually use.
On mac you can quickly switch back and forth between inverted color with ctrl+apple+option+8. It isn't perfect, but for most webpages / text documents it works fine. Additionally, in Universal Access (System Preferences), there's a grayscale option.
I'm not sure if there's something like that in Windows.
It's also good for reading at night and you don't want the entire room to see you're face lit up like a Christmas tree.
This is Biology. We do have 3 kinds of cones with very specific respones curves.
There might be theory as to how the signals are processed in the optic nerves, but we definitely do not have cones for 'channels'
It is probably true for those very old monochrome monitors that had like half a second of persistence, but it is definately not the case for color TVs. Yes, there is some persistency, but over 95% of the photons are emitted within a millisecond after the electron beam hits the phosphor, and the other 5% are emitted gradually over tens of milliseconds. The net effect is that there's sharp flashing, plus about 5% (in this example) of a more-or-less constant background. That is not going to improve the flicker a lot; otherwise you could just point a lightbulb at your TV to increase the background illumination.
You can see the background light for yourself by taking a photo of a TV screen with a 1/200 exposure time.
What makes the flicker less obvious with a TV is that you normally watch a TV at 5-10 times the screen diagonal, and a computer monitor at only 2 times the screen diagonal, such that a much larger area of your field of view is covered by the screen. People are most sensitive to flicker at the edges of the field of view.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Sub-pixel antialiasing might look sharper, but it'll always feel a bit out of place. I don't think it's easier to read. If you want bolder fonts, make them bolder, it's just that simple. If anything, sub-pixel precision is going to make them thinner. And not that it's an iFeature for iDigital iStylists only; FreeType and even Windows also support that.
Most font designers enjoy looking at bug legs on a screen, but I don't, so my fonts are personal modifications of popular fonts to make them bolder. (And yes, OMG, I have modified them which may be a violation of font designers' licenses! Fuck them!)
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Here's another webpage that uses color very efficiently to transport an important message link
... if black on white hurts your eyes, there's probably something else wrong there too. Not saying that black on white is optimal anyway, but it shouldn't be enough by itself to give you a headache or tire your eyes.
It generally boils down to: IMHO most people I've seen using computers are doing it wrong for their eyes.
For starters make sure you use a large enough, and clear enough, font so you don't have to squint. If you absolutely need 80 lines on the screen when editing sources, that's usually your clue that there's something wrong with your programming style (and I suspect for some people the short term memory too.) You shouldn't have methods that run over that many lines, unless they're truly trivial stuff. (Like, say, a long switch statement where each line does no more than delegate to a method of its own. Arguably there are better ways there too, but I don't find it to be the end of the world either.)
IDE's also offer a lot of tools to find the method you need, when you need it, and/or collaps/expand blocks so the don't take up screen estate when you don't need them. There's also stuff like showing you the parameters anyway, so you don't have to have a second window in which you look for the parameters to that method. And really lots of other stuff. Use those instead of cramming the absolute maximum lines of text on the screen.
When I see a couple of co-workers squinting at their 6 point Illegible Roman font in VI and doing greps manually in another illegible tiled window, heh, I'm just itching to tell them to move out of the stone age already. We even discovered this funky thing called the "wheel" in the meantime, ya know?
Clean your monitor regularly, especially if it's a CRT. CRT's have thick glass, and your eyes end up focusing back and forth between the dirt on the front side of it, and the letters on the back side of it. But it's distracting and tiresome on TFTs too. And if you need to squint because you're at the point of "is that a 'm' or a 'rn'? Or is it 'rh' behind that speck?" it's long overdue for a cleaning.
Do turn your contrast up, but turn your brightness down to a comfortable level. The monitor is not supposed to be an AA searchlight. Staring into very bright stuff, especially in a dark room, _is_ tiresome. Here especially the TFT's are the biggest offenders. The manufacturers got stuck on bragging about the brightness of their monitors, as if that's something good, and pre-set them to insanely bright levels. Turn that down to where you can live with the white for hours.
And it will be even more important when you have to focus on stuff that's the other way around: white on black. (Some websites love that scheme, for example.) On an ultra-bright monitors that will mean focusing on a mostly black screen, so your pupils are wide open, but some pieces of retina are getting to see some really bright letters. It's a recipe for a headache.
As a side-note, I'm genuinely surprised at how many people do the exact opposite. I've seen too many monitors which are turned to abysmal contrast, and as bright as halogen headlights. I mean, WTF? Some things are barely legible in that configuration.
Ok, so maybe it's good for PC games, where the average dev seems to think that every fucking thing must happen in nearly complete darkness. 'Cause, you know, we have 32 bit colours so we can display all the gamut of "black", "really dark", "dark grey", "room with a broken lightbulb" and "grey stone on a moonless night". But the brightness settings where you see in near dark in games, suck for work or even reading in a browser. If you use the same monitor for games, consider turning up the brightness or gamma up in those, instead of turning the monitor's brightness all the way to the right.
If you're stuck with a CRT, make sure it's a good one and properly tuned. Staring into an unfocused image, especially with small unfocused fonts, is a recipe for a headache.
Again, for CRT users, just because everything idiotically defaults to 60 Hz, is no
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
CRT pixels do not line up precisely with their r, g, and b light emission points, at least on most CRTs. If you look at a single white pixel on a field of black through a lupe, you'll see it's composed of a number of red, green, and blue dots, not one dot for each color. Look at a different pixel, and the exact pattern will be different (shifted a little).
They use a couple of electromagnetic coils in the rear of the tube to guide an electron beam to the right point on the CRT's surface, but it is not so precise on most models (though maybe some really high end stuff for scientific work) as to be able to exactly hit specific phosphorescent spots.
This is why sub-pixel rendering works on LCDs but not CRTs (which turn on and off [or shade] specific color points digitally), because we know the exact shape and color layout of each pixel.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
On Windows font antialiasing makes fonts thinner but not on a Mac. On a Mac their goal is precision of the characters for print so the sizes and thinkness are correct although they look a little fuzzy on screen.
Time makes more converts than reason
Most OSes have a tool that you can tune the subpixel rendering. Windows has a Cleartype Tuning tool, for instance, that allows you to change it to a crisper rendering yet still retail the benefits of subpixel rendering -- or lets you pick what I would consider very blurry text (which is actually useful for users that use very large default text sizes).
Readability and eyestrain are always at odds with each other. For readability purposes you want very high contrast between your foreground (text) and background colors. Obviously, white-on-black or black-on-white are the best choices for readability. The problem is over long periods of time high contrast viewing creates eye strain. This is why legal pads are yellow, for instance. The slightly lower contrast between a yellow background and a dark foreground reduces, but does not eliminate eye strain. The problem recurs at the other end of the spectrum if you have too low a contrast between your foreground and background. Your eyes strain to read the text and it makes things harder to read, period.
As far as colors go, the bottom line depends on the individual. We all see things a little differently, literally! Our visual acuity and duration to eye strain are metrics that do not necessarily apply to everyone and you really have to experiment to find out what contrast level works best for you.
The font issue is a little more defined. Proportional serif fonts (Times, Garamond, etc.) are good for print applications and are the most commonly used in printed publications. Proportional sans-serif fonts (Verdana, Arial, etc.) are best read on computer screens because of the dithering that often occurs to serif fonts. They are also easier to read on computer screens because the characters are more easily recognizable in the simpler, sans-serif form.
That's about all I can share on the subject. There are some well established guidelines, but because every human being is a little different there aren't any real hard and fast rules.
Sirs:
I am from planet Earth, that revoles around a type N star, in the MilkyWay Galixy.
In our Galixy, type N stars ( main sequince ) emit a light power spectrum centered around
6300deg Kelvin, a light wavelength we call 'Yellow'.
White light is a broad spectrum light that has equal power on all frequencies.
The light of a N type star, of which our sun is one, is centered on the Yellow
part of the light spectrium. Remember ROYGBV. Red stars are hotter, Yellow is ours,
and Blue stars are cooler, and UV stars are the coolest!
At least that was the order of things, according to astronmetrics,
when I got my MS, and I dont think a lot has changed.
What is interesting about human eyes, is that the power RESPONSE curve,
matches our sun, as exactly as we can measure it.
Now. WHAT STAR ARE YOU FROM?