[PLUG] Font sizes on pixilla (QXGA T60)

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 16:10, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> After some initial euphoria with the QXGA 2Kx1.5K T60 laptop
> (two page 12 point text in OpenOffice looks wonderful!), I am
> running into font problems, mostly browser related.
>
> Google gadgets are clipped.  Some flash content comes in Really
> Small.  Some use 5x7 fonts, the line spacing is 1.2 mm!  Thumbnails
> are tiny.  I imagine I will find fixes, but the original incentive
> (making cleaner looking, easier to read characters for old eyes)
> is not happening the way I had hoped.
>
> The pixels on this thing are 0.15mm.  Crazy small.  An iPhone is
> 0.16mm, and an 11.6 inch WXGA 1101 EeePC is 2.3mm.
>
> Yes, I can use a magnifier like kmag, or bring the machine up
> in 1024x768 screen mode.  The  Ctrl+ "view larger" on firefox
> does expand pictures, but some things ignore that.
>
> Hopefully, in a week or two, I will find some fixes, probably some
> hidden firefox configuration parameters.  Meanwhile, I can think
> vengeful thoughts about all the young programmers writing unscalable
> apps.  Someday, their young eyes will get old, they will no longer
> be able to see their own apps, get fired, and live in the gutter :-/

opera does a much better job than firefox of scaling the page,
graphics, layout, and plugins included, to any size.  firefox has been
catching up lately, but it's still no contest.  i use a monitor from
6' away every day and while i did ruin my eyesight doing it on a 14"
greenscreen in the 90's, my eyesight has not degraded in the past 8
years since i got a decently sized monitor (just 21"), picked a font
that is larger for all my apps (took some doing to get stuff like
menus in opera/firefox to use the bigger font, but i don't use all
that many apps, really), and found that opera scaled every damn thing
including flash videos when i make the page bigger.

anyway, while i am an evangelist for opera (disclosure, they used to
give me schwag since i ran a user group for them in austin, but it's
been a long time since that was true), it actually does perform far
better when you have a monitor that's got pixels too small or is too
far away from your face.  worth trying, methinks, before you ditch the
monitor.