Resolution indpendence

[Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen]

Steven J Newbury <steve at snewbury.org.uk> writes:

> On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 16:10 +0200, Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen wrote:
[...]
>> Exactly.  With the current monitor resolutions, the interesting "real
>> world" unit tends to be the pixel.  So my "resolution" is 1
>> dot-per-pixel, regardless of how many dots-per-inch there are.
>> 
>> I want a high resolution monitor to get more screen real estate, not
>> to get better edge smoothing.  When we start approaching 300dpi
>> graphics pipelines, I will probably change my mind, but that's still
>> pretty far off it seems.
> I suspect you may not represent the majority you *think* you do.  I know
> a great many people who run their systems (with LCD display hardware) at
> under resolution because they do not want a large screen area with tiny
> elements.  The scaling hardware in the LCD gives them the "resolution
> independence" they need, but we can (and should) do so much better!

I'm not in any way delusional about being in the majority here :)

(I've had pretty much everyone in my office complain that the text on
my monitor is illegible.)

Even so, I don't think it invalidates the statement that "you can not
get resolution independence when the raster has low resolution".  In
fact, I'm pretty sure many people (with good eyesight) would be happy
with smaller text on a high-resolution display quite simply because a
high-resolution display would make the smaller text more legible.
100dpi is so low resolution it tends to make the screen look like a
mosaic.

This also points out the obvious: different people want different
things.  Forcing everyone to use true 10pt fonts would be almost as
wrong as forcing everyone to use 10px fonts.

eirik