The Case For Flipping Your Monitor From Landscape to Portrait

Molly McHugh writes The vast majority of computer-related tasks see no benefit from a screen that is longer than it is tall. Sure, video playback and gaming are some key exceptions, but if you watch Netflix on your TV instead of your computer monitor and you're not into PC gaming, that long, wide display is doing nothing but hampering your experience. Let's flip it. No, seriously. Let's flip it sideways.

Comments

Have Both

[PvtVoid]

I have two monitors: one landscape, one next to it flipped into portrait mode. It's not fucking rocket science.

Re:Have Both

[ArcadeMan]

I use my monitor rotated in portrait mode and rotated 270 degrees.

Re:Have Both

[BarbaraHudson]

I use my monitor rotated in portrait mode and rotated 270 degrees.

I've rotated my screen 360 degrees :-)

"The vast majority of computer-related tasks see no benefit from a screen that is longer than it is tall."

Seriously, most of todays screens are so big that you can fit 2 pages side-by-side, which is a lot more convenient than one page at a time in portrait mode. Ditto for individual windows. Rotating them into portrait mode will cause neck strain as you have to tilt your head back to properly see the top.

Re:Have Both

[whoever57]

I've rotated my screen 360 degrees :-)

Does it improve the picture now that you have twisted cables?

Re: Have Both

[wbo]

ClearType / Subpixel font rendering works just fine on my Windows 7 PC with 1 24" monitor in landscape and another 24" rotated in portrait.

It didn't work for some reason when I had a fairly old ATI/AMD graphics card (It didn't take into account the rotation of the portrait monitor), But when I replaced the card with a mid-range nVidia card the problem went away. My guess is the ATI graphics driver wasn't properly reporting the orientation and pixel layout information received from the monitor.

I have seen some (usually cheap) monitors that don't appear to have an option in their menu to set their orientation. My guess is ClearType probably wouldn't work properly on them since the DDC information would be incorrect when rotated, but that is more of a problem with the monitor than Windows.

Re:Have Both

[Ottibus]

I've rotated my screen 360 degrees :-)

Does it improve the picture now that you have twisted cables?

Make sure you rotate by -360 degress in the Southern Hemisphere or the electrons will get tangled.

You're Doing It Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The examples show lots of web sites in a maximized browser window. I use my widescreen monitor in landscape mode so I can have multiple windows simultaneously visible side-by-side. The examples are doing it poorly!

Re: You're Doing It Wrong

[Immerman]

Actually as I recall that's an included behavior in Windows 7 at least - drag a window to one edge of the screen and it "semi-maximizes" to fill that half. Tweakable in whatever settings screen lets you drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize. (Not using Windows at the moment, so can't test)

View angles

[MrLogic17]

Some monitors are make to be viewed landscape, and when rotated have horrible view angles.
I found some at work where the view angle was so bad, only one eye would get a good picture, while the other eye showed a faded & discolored image. Rubber-necking around would find a small sweet spot for viewing.

TLDR; doesn't work well on some monitors.

Re:View angles

[jandrese]

In general: avoid TN displays if you intend to rotate the screen. IPS displays are much better for this.

Re:View angles

[Russ1642]

And here's the comment I was looking for. Monitors aren't designed to be placed into portrait mode. They completely suck. Each eye sees different brightnesses and colours. It's truly awful unless you're one of those people that doesn't mind a distorted image. You probably have your widescreen TV in 4:3 to 16:9 stretch mode at home too.

Everything old is new again

[XxtraLarGe]

Portrait monitors were all the rage back in the 90's. All the desktop publishing people used them for working with Aldus Pagemaker.

Re:Depends

[landoltjp]

I just got turned on by this.

Don't

[zmooc]

So because web designers fail to properly design the web and thus leave me with ridiculously narrow columns, I should rotate my monitor? That's rubbish. Scientific research has shown again and again that we can read longer lines much more efficiently than we can read short lines, even though our subjective experience is often to the contrary. Just fix those websites and keep your monitor in landscape. Thank you.

Re:Help!

[Russ1642]

JB Weld.

The case for not:

[Culture20]

Subpixels orient horizontally.

Snap: Tiling window manager in Windows 7+

[tepples]

Setting a system so that 'maximize' only expands a window to fill half of your giant wide screen

In Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, pressing Win+Left or Win+Right (or dragging a window's title bar to the left or right edge) will "Snap" it, which expands it to fill half the screen. In previous versions of Windows, you could do something similar by clicking one window's title in the taskbar, Ctrl+right-clicking another, and choosing Tile Vertically.

Re:Read one, write other

[ArcadeMan]

I guess you've never seen a regular web user. They don't write documents at the same time they're reading a website.

They just read websites.

VVS

[fox171171]

Sure, video playback and gaming are some key exceptions

Well, with all the tards with VVS, I suppose even video is not always an exception either.

Vertical Video Syndrome - A PSA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You're not shooting that right dummy!

Line length and eye movement error

[tepples]

Scientific research has shown again and again that we can read longer lines much more efficiently than we can read short lines

Up to a point. True, 75 columns are better than 25. But the research I've read concludes that line lengths past 80 columns (roughly 36-40em) cause the reader to accidentally skip or repeat lines more often.