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Displays Graphics Operating Systems Software

Window Managers for High Resolution Displays? 382

Posted by Cliff from the one-with-the-most-dots-WINS! dept.
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?"
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Window Managers for High Resolution Displays? More

Window Managers for High Resolution Displays?

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  • Workaround for you... (Score:5, Informative)

    by eaglebtc ( 303754 ) * on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:26PM (#6539909)
    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!
    • That was incredibly informative... and he even got the FP in there too (and he's actually the FP).

      That has to be the best post EVER.
      • the "*" could be an indication... he saw it a few minutes before the mindless FP war.

        although I do admit, for a FP it works... BTW that trick works quite nicely on a microtron monitor. although I still would rather get better glasses than lose screen real-estate.

        Don't be afraid to screw with the extend settings of ClearText either, on a trinitron/microtron/lcd it makes things nice and smooth, especially higher than 96dpi text. Personally I drive any display at it's peak and tweak the fonts to match.
    • yeah, and everything looks CLUNKY AS HELL when you do that. It's not like Quartz on OSX where everything scales properly. only the text gets bigger, everything else stays the same size, which means everything gets way F'd up. Hopefully they'll get this fixed in future versions...

      • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:5, Informative)

        by josh crawley ( 537561 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:56PM (#6540404)
        In Windows, the OS is precisely compliant to what the application developer wanted the program to do. For instance, if I write a web page with an "img src" tag with the height and width set in pixels, then the image will be that size, regardless of the resolution of the monitor. If I set the height and width in a proportional unit like points, or to be a percentage of the window size, then it will scale along with everything else. Programming using Windows Forms works the same way, although I know some of the old widgets refused scaling (I seem to recall some difference in the Picture vs Bitmap control in VB 5 or 6).

        In other words, it's up to the app developer to base their UI on the dynamic System Properties rather than on fixed values. If, for instance, Windows YP was developed to "override" fixed pixel sizes and try to make them proportional, it would probably screw up more than it would fix.

    • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:5, Informative)

      by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:47PM (#6540035)
      Yes, LCDs don't have to run at their native resolution. But they really look like crap at lower resolutions. Particuarlly for displaying text. Which would make things worse for the guy asking the question.

      Run the monitor at its native resolution, tell Windows to use Extra Large fonts, and make sure to set the anti-aliasing to ClearType. ClearType actually makes a very big difference on how legible the text is. I think that's the best bet on getting a legible display on Windows with an LCD.

      • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:58PM (#6540092) Journal
        Yes, LCDs don't have to run at their native resolution. But they really look like crap at lower resolutions. Particuarlly for displaying text.

        If the target image pixel size does not map to the screen pixel size in a clean fraction (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc), then some pixels "consume" more of the image than others, making for lumpy-looking text. Averaging could be used, but that would make the edges of the text fuzzier.

        CRT's are still the king of multi-resolutions.

        Using "Large Fonts" settings is probably a better option to try than non-native LCD resolution.

      • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Skater ( 41976 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:02PM (#6540118) Homepage Journal
        My experience is that the early ones are as you describe, but the more recent models (in the last year or so) are much better about this. In fact, the current LCD I have and the previous one were both specified to run at 1280x1024, but I've always run them at 1024x768, and they look great.

        --RJ

        • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by haoto ( 679744 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @05:07PM (#6541328)
          One problem is that 1024x768 and 1280x1024 are in different proportions, so the images you get will be a little stretched out. To maintain original proportions you will need to find a larger screen with 1400x1050 or 1600x1200 resolution, but they seem to be still unreasonably expensive and rare.
      • You haven't been using the right LCDs, then. Check out Samsung's line, they all do something akin to "pixel blending" at the lower resolutions. I was quite impressed at the aliasing displayed when I installed win2k on an office system w/ one such new LCD.

    • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tet ( 2721 ) * <slashdot AT astradyne DOT co DOT uk> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:48PM (#6540043) Homepage Journal
      You are free to set an LCD to run at 640x480, 800x600, or whatever you like.

      Sure, you're free to run it at whatever resolution you like. Of course, unlike a CRT, it'll look like shit most of the time, but hey, flat panels are sexy, right, so who cares? To be fair, if your full reolution is an integer multiple of your scaled resultion, then it'll be a bit blocky, but otherwise OK. Personally, I'll be sticking with my CRT for some time yet.

      For cfish, my advice is relax. Yes, in time, CRTs will be phased out of the mass market. But they'll still be around for the forseeable future, they'll just be a niche device, so you won't be able to get them from high street shops. Even then, that's still a fair way off...

      • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:02PM (#6540122)
        Actually, the submitter was talking about 200 dpi displays. These (as yet largely mythical) displays would be able to scale down nicely. A 3840x2400 display, for example, can scale down to 1920x1200 at 4:1, or 1280x800 at 9:1, or even 960x600 at 16:1.

        A 1280x1024 display, though, can only scale down evenly to 640x512... which isn't especially helpful unless you're legally blind. This fellow isn't.
        • ViewSonic has a 200 DPI 22.2" display, 3840x2400.
          (http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lc d _vp2290b.htm )
          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: 1280
          • My Samsuing 191N (1280x1024, 19") has an "image size" option on its menu, which - on non-native resolutions - lets me choose from "normal" (a box in the middle of the screen, good for 1024x768, etc.), "expanded 1" (stretches the screen to the sides, but leaves bars at the top and bottom, good for 640x480), and "expanded 2" (stretches to fullscreen, generally looks crappy). It also remembers this setting for each resolution used.

            Frankly, at LCD prices, I think the monitors should be smart enough to work th

    • Also, Windows lets you adjust the scale of the fonts. I don't mean by changing the font size-point (10, 12). But under the video advanced settings, you can adjust it to preset sizes: Normal, Large. Or even set it to a custom setting.
    • 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.
    • No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.

      Oh well. Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my n

      • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:4, Informative)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:23PM (#6540224)
        No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.


        Guess what, you could say exactly the same thing about your beloved CRTs, because they have dot pitch. The only difference has been that traditionally the dot pitch was smaller than the pixels on LCDs. But as your parent mentioned, 200 dpi LCDs will scale well. Those will be ready in plenty of time before CRTs become specialty items.

      • You've probably never seen a properly tuned and set up LCD display. Get it to phase lock perfectly by adjusting on a 1-pixel checkerboard (like an old X background) until there are no artifacts (my monitor has automatic lock fine tuning, but it only works perfectly when such a bitmap is displayed).

        Turn on sub-pixel sampling (a.k.a. ClearType). Now you've effectively got 3840x1024 resolution in the luminance channel on text. You'll never go back to a fuzzy 100 pound room heating CRT again, even if it's a h

      • Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.

        Actually, as more people buy LCD monitors the price you are likely to pay for your next Trinitron will be higher.

    • Re:Workaround for you... (Score:4, Funny)

      by WhaDaYaKnow ( 563683 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:07PM (#6540151)
      But but, you don't understand. You can't just go ahead and come up with solutions that have worked on M$ products for years now.

      This was supposed to be the killer app for Linux to obtain world domination! It was to open up that huge untapped market of 'older folks and those who have eye strain problems', because everyone knows that Linux is _the_ product for older folks. The only thing keeping it back was the font size.

      ---

      I can't believe this story was posted. The story should have read: I don't know how to configure my system, what do I do?

      (And to all the replies bitching about an LCD being ugly at lower resolutions, read the gawdamn comment. There is a perfectly viable alternative at native resolution. btw. I have a friend who is practically blind, and he actually chooses to run his 1600x1200 LCD at 800x600 mode. He's happy as a clam)

  • Change the font size! (Score:5, Informative)

    by danrees ( 557289 ) * <dan&dwrees,co,uk> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:27PM (#6539916) Homepage
    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

    • Re:Change the font size! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:38PM (#6539991) Homepage
      The trouble is there are still a lot of apps that specify things in pixel sizes rather than in real units (centimetres) or some other scalable unit (fraction of the total display size). So even if you increase the font size - and that would require a system with fonts that aren't ugly, so you're not forced to use a few predefined bitmaps - you may find everything else is too small.

      It'll be great when everything uses SVG icons which are rendered at the size you choose and at the right resolution for the display, but that day is a way off yet.
      • Could you give an example of such an app? I haven't had that problem and I'd be curious to see a program that "breaks" at high resolutions.
        • I used to make GUI apps in Windows. Its a REAL pain to get just right for any font at any res. Even with what is called the dialog unit. The problem is you need to develop your app in a wide/tall fixed width font. Then let windows scale it.

          Now the dialog unit is based on the font metrics you are currently using. What is selected into that window context at that time. You can create each control individually. This is a real pain to get child/parent relationships correct with. You could also use the
          • XP is probably the first windows that takes some of what the original poster was bitching about. It lets you scale most things. However I would be willing to bet most third party windows do not take these sorts of things into account.

            Nope, it's been there since Win95. Also, the vast majority of professional apps developed in say the past 8 years, base measurements on the System Properties. You usually see problems with some app developed as "my first VB project" by some guy in Bum-Fucked Eastern Siberia o
      • It's bad enough that web designers are specifying things like this. It's not just crap sites, but 'serious' commercial sites that use small-ass fonts that don't respond to IE's 'Text Size' modifications. I'm not sure who to blame more... MSFT, for not letting IE work, or the webmonkies who are convinced that their page must look EXACTLY like they want it to.
    • I second that. I run 1600x1200 with a lot of 14- and 16-point fonts that look amazingly smooth and readable. I'm really not sure what the poster's problem is.
    • 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 t

  • Just do what grandma does... (Score:3, Funny)

    by greg987123 ( 677841 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:29PM (#6539928)
    Use a magnifying glass! ;)

  • Buy a magnifier. (Score:5, Informative)

    by janda ( 572221 ) <janda@kali-tai.net> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:29PM (#6539935) Homepage

    They make full-screen monitor magnifiers for people with vision problems. Take a look here [edexen.com] for starters.

    • Or how about an LCD Projector, like you see in conference rooms?

      • Eeeek! NOOOO!

        Have you tried using those things for anything other than presentations and watching movies? It's horrible.

        Or maybe that's just the one we have at work, which I actually have to use for real stuff every now and then when I'm setting up the interactive whiteboard.
    • Wow. I should get myself one of these, and a little bitty CRT, and it will be just like the movie Brazil!

    • Re:Buy a magnifier. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AaronStJ ( 182845 ) <AaronStJNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:08PM (#6540156) Homepage
      They make full-screen monitor magnifiers for people with vision problems.

      This isn't the point. I've used those magnifiers before (although my vision is good), and they make the whole screen look distorted. But that's not the point, either. The point is we have more and more screen real estate, and a lot of times in the desktop realm, it basically goes to waste. It used to be we needed thos extra pixels to fit more information on the screen. But I think we've hit the point that we doesn't need much more information to fit on the screen. And now instead of things getting smoother and smoother (like in a full-screen 3d game) things just get smaller and smaller. Sure, you can fit more 'stuff' it on the screen, but I'd bet at least 50% of computer users (even those without vision problems) dislike the teeny-tiny text and widgets that comes with an uber-large resolution, and would instead prefer a smoother dsiplay. I know I would

      There are several problems I've noticed that will have to adressed to deal with huge resolutions. I don't think fixing these problem would make or break Linux, but it would make a nive bullet point. There a problems like the teeny-tiny text I've mentioned, and tiny icons, but that can be easily fixed. The biggest problems are on the brower front. If you have your resolution jacked up terribly high, rather than getting a smoother-looking website, you usually get a tiny little strip on the left side of your browser. This is largely due to the fact that most website layouts are largely depended on fixed-size raster images (despite the intent of HTML). But even the most popular vector formant, Flash, just stays in a tiny little fixed-size box on the web page, despite your resolution. And what sense does that make? If you visit homestarrunner.com with a huge resolution, you end up with a talking postage stamp, even though it is a vector-based postage stamp, and therefore inherently infinitely scalable without loss of clarity! What is needed is less of a reliance of pixel graphics, and more of a reliace on vector formats, coupled with a browser that can scale the whole page at once, not just the text.

      On the operating system front, we need scalable widgets, scalable icons, and easily changed font default font sizes. I know you can change the dpi of your monitor in Windows, but how many average users want to wander into a section marked 'Advanced Settings'?

      Face it, this is and issue, and it does need to be adressed.
    • i run at 1920x1080 on a 17" CRT (so my display is letterboxed :P) and I'm used to it now, but i do sometimes use command-option-[plus] or -[minus] to zoom in and out (OS X). I could totally use one of these things. I don't get eye strain tho because I tend to look away to the TV from time to time.

  • Quartz (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:29PM (#6539936)
    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.

    • Re:Quartz (Score:3, Informative)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 )
      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.

      Every OS makes use of TrueType fonts.

      IIRC, essentially the entire UI is vector graphics (being done by OpenGL and all), so Apple might have this covered.

      You do not recall correctly. The Aqua gui is entirely pixmap based, the widgets aren't even scalable (which has caused the safari team some grief).

    • It is well suited for this kind of thing. I love the way everything looks on my older 21" Studio Display at 1600x1200 but obviously we are talking about some very small text which has gotten harder for me to read as I've gotten closer to 40. I have never had really good vision to begin with but in OSX it's no problem to crank the fonts up to a size that's perfectly readable by me and it still looks great. Smooth and clear and big enough to read.

    • So how do you make it work? I'm typing this on a new Powerbook with OSX, and I have sorta figured out how to change the font sizes (though they don't always seem to stay changed). But this applies only to text.
      The writer was asking about such things as menus, images, etc. Nothing I do changes any of these at all.

      Actually, I have the opposite problem: People are always complaining about the tiny fonts that I use. This is because I try to use the smallest font that I can read, so I can get more info on

  • waimea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by B1ackDragon ( 543470 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:31PM (#6539946)
    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.

  • Phasing Out? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cephalien ( 529516 ) <benjaminlungerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:31PM (#6539948)
    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.

    • Re:Phasing Out? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Phosphor3k ( 542747 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:38PM (#6539997)
      I know local conputer shops that have already phased out CRTs because the shipping is so much cheaper that it balances out. They also save much needed floorspace in their inventories.
    • Not to flame (too much :) but this is a seriously flawed argument to make.

      Stating that LCD's are inferior because you don't have enough room on a 15", and CRT's are much better because you do have enough room on a 21"? I challenge you to find enough room for large fonts on a 15" CRT.. you'd be saying the exact same complaint.

      Not neccessarily defending LCD's here (or CRT's) but if you're going to compare the two, you should at least offer them the dignity of testing against equal feature sets.

  • What you want is an SVG UI (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bistronaut ( 267467 ) * on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:31PM (#6539950) Homepage Journal
    ..and people are working on it. Seek KDE [kde.org] and I found this project [sourceforge.net] 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.
    • Well, I think GNOME can use SVG graphics pretty much throughout the desktop these days, although SVG icons tend to look bad at low resolutions so not many people use it.

      Having said that widget toolkits with containment based layouts like GTK and Qt are much better for this sort of thing. Traditional Win32 widgets/windows have no concept of geometry management, meaning that they are hard to make resizable and don't deal well with text changing their size as can happen with odd font sizes and internationali

  • x-ray (Score:5, Informative)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:33PM (#6539960) Homepage
    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

  • Scaling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by compwizrd ( 166184 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:33PM (#6539965)
    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.

  • It's a fence. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Martigan80 ( 305400 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:35PM (#6539972) Journal
    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....

  • Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zagar ( 610861 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:35PM (#6539973)
    This is the perfect opportunity to invent some sort of magnifying device...Yes..it should be portable and light. I'll call it glasses.
  • 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 know how you feel (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:35PM (#6539979) Journal
    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 /.

  • Wrong focus (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:38PM (#6539995) Homepage
    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?
  • 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.
  • In the long run, OS's and Programs that allow you to easily zoom in and read small print will be the norm. Things are only occasionally hard to read now, because cheap hi-resolution displays are only now becoming common, and we have a lot of legacy software.

    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 environ

  • windows Accessibility (Score:5, Informative)

    by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:41PM (#6540008)
    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)

    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 /. after all.

    • Re:windows Accessibility (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Build6 ( 164888 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:02PM (#6540113)

      IANAL (and also not American, which will be relevant re: below-) but from what I understand, virtually all large US corporations have put in effort into this kind of thing - isnt' there some kind of "Americans with Disabilities Act" which legislates companies over a certain size having to make sure their products/services etc. can be used by, well, Americans with Disabilities?

      In which case for legal compliance (plus also the reasons both that they have enough money to make them worth suing, and that they have the resources to throw into developing such things) it is not surprising that they would have such features.

      that said, I am NOT saying this out of a knee-jerk anti-MS reaction (but, rather, a knee-jerk anti-all-large-corporations reaction :-)

  • Mac OS X can zoom in (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:41PM (#6540014)
    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.
    • Hey, where's this OS "universal access control panel"? I've never heard of it, and the finder doesn't seem to be able to find it.

      Also, I've found that disk ejection is not just a problem on linux; I've seen people having problems getting the box to release the CD on every kind of system. Usually when this happens, you have to find the program that has grabbed the CD and kill it. This can be difficult if the app has closed its window but is still running windowless in the background. On Windows, often a

      • Re:Mac OS X can zoom in (Score:3, Interesting)

        by HiredMan ( 5546 )
        Also, is there any way to learn these things other than by asking in a public forum like this?

        The better question is, "Would please find another way to learn these things rather than asking in a public forum?"

        In Finder - access the Help menu. (It's last menu item as in ALL applications.) In the search section type "eject CD" or "How do I eject a disk" or any other number of things and you'll get a list of responses. Second on the list is:

        If your keyboard has an eject (F12) key, you can use that to eject

    • 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.

  • Windows (Score:5, Informative)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) * on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:49PM (#6540046)
    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.

    Using XP, but it's almost the same on 2000 and NT:
    1. Right-click on the desktop
    2. Select "Properties" from the menu that will appear
    3. Select the "Appearance" tab from the window that will appear
    4. Select "Large" or "Extra large" from the "Font Size" menu on that pane.
    5. Click "OK"

    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.

    • Re:Windows (Score:3, Informative)

      by ptr2void ( 590259 )

      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.

      Yes. The feature has been there for ages. Unused. At least 70% of the Windows desktop software (that I used) ignore it. Either

  • Native Resolution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @12:58PM (#6540091) Homepage
    Many new LCD displays have hardware support for scaling non-native resolutions. You can run the display at 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, etc. without it looking horrible.

    The long-term trend in displays is to decouple capture/creation resolution from storage/transport resolution from display resolution.

  • Perhaps future KDE versions? (Score:3, Informative)

    by GeekDork ( 194851 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:00PM (#6540106)

    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.

  • Already works fine (Score:3, Insightful)

    by po8 ( 187055 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:06PM (#6540143)

    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>

  • 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.
  • Control panel / Display / Appearance, adjust the Font Size combo-box.

    What's the problem?

  • Opera has a great zoom feature that might help out (Score:3, Informative)

    by james72 ( 684835 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @01:29PM (#6540266)
    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.

  • Funny math- 200DPI=2400x1800 at 15" (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 instea
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • How to change in Linux (Score:3, Informative)

    by Richard_J_N ( 631241 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:01PM (#6540745)
    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.

    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 /etc/X11/Xresources to

    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

  • What about implementing Bicubic scaling? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by default luser ( 529332 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:29PM (#6540867) Journal
    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...

  • Get a Plasma Display (Score:3, Interesting)

    by snookerdoodle ( 123851 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @04:23PM (#6541161)
    '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 already do what you want... (Score:3, Informative)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @11:11PM (#6542758) Homepage
    ...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

  • Apple, Windows, Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Sunday July 27, 2003 @12:12AM (#6542895) Journal
    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.

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