Resolution indpendence

[Olivier Galibert]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 02:41:23AM -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 20:29 +0100, Glynn Clements wrote:
> > 
> > Using physical units (which includes point sizes) implies that a
> > monitor of a given size will display the same amount of content
> > regardless of the resolution.
> 
> Printing to a higher resolution printer, do you get more content?  It's
> the same eye looking at it.  Your eye sight doesn't improve by higher
> resolution!

My eyesight is better than the screen resolution.  All the monitors I
currently have (1024x768 12" laptop, 1600x1200 20" TFT) have a DPI
small enough that I can see individual pixels.  On all of them I use a
font[1] where the size of the 'e' is 5x5 pixels and I can read it
without difficulty.  In comparison an anti-aliased vector font at the
same pixel size would be very hard to read due to its lowpass
filtering over the visible frequencies.  The eye is very sensitive to
high frequencies, i.e. edges.

So yes, in that range of DPI higher resolution means more content, not
more definition.  That sure will change when the DPIs get much higher
(and the 300DPI rule of thumb may be a good one) but right now
individual pixels are so big that every pixel counts.  And the
existence of very new devices in the 200DPI range does not invalidate
that fact for all the other already existing monitors.

  OG.

[1] -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-m-60-iso8859-15