Text too small at 1920*1200

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qwertz325

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Apr 4, 2008
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I have a lenovo L220x and as you may know it's a 22'' with a resolution of 1920*1200 pixels. As you can imagine, it makes for a very sharp image but also a painfuly small one.

You can go around this by messing about with the font settings in windows and your web browser or increasing the DPI, but none of those really work. Often text will overlap, if the text is in a picture (as it is on a lot of web sites) or if I'm using some application which doesn't allow messing about with fonts (and most don't) there's no helping it at all. And it's not just the text. I like to sit quite far from my monitor because I think it's better for the eyes and a lot of the time the pictures are too small, too. Sure I can use some program to zoom in or download the picture and than use zoom on it but that's very unpractical.

What I'm wondering is is there any way that I could make the image be the size it would on, say 800*600 while keeping my fancy HD res? So what I mean is to make the computer draw out a larger image (meaning not just the fonts or certain pictures, because if you go about it enlarging individual elements most of the time you crew up the layout of webpages to the point of unreadability). It would make my life tremendously easier and my eyes wouldn't feel like hell every day.

I bet there's a lot of you out there with this problem. Please, help!
 
Sitting too far away can be just as hard on your eyes as sitting too close, if not worse. If you're eyes are hurting, then you need to adjust you viewing distance to one that's more comfortable for them.

As far as adjusting the font/photo size, I've found nothing that works well.
 
I think 2560 x 1600 @ 30" might be worse... Actually 1280 x 800 @ 12" and I've seen seen 1366 x 768 at 11" and I think 1280 x 768 @ 9"

So it gets worse, I'd actually like to see the Lenovo in person.

I think you might just have to resort to running the non-native resolution. Unfortunately it sucks running non-native :(
 
ryan_975 Sitting too far away can be just as hard on your eyes as sitting too close, if not worse. If you're eyes are hurting, then you need to adjust you viewing distance to one that's more comfortable for them.
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Of course, I have a setup now where I've created a theme in windows with large fonts and icons, and, in windows, it works fine. I can see the text just as clearly as I would a much smaller text if I was sitting much closer to the screen. In firefox I use the zoom option (ctrl+mousewheel) and that work fine as long as the webpage isn't put together in such a way that text might overlap or hang out of buttons or as long as the text isn't in a picture, because any of that will make the page unreadable and unnavigable.

When it comes to applications there's just plain no helping it. Even if I were to sit very close it would still be a problem.

I think 2560 x 1600 @ 30" might be worse... Actually 1280 x 800 @ 12" and I've seen seen 1366 x 768 at 11" and I think 1280 x 768 @ 9"
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Christ!

I think you might just have to resort to running the non-native resolution. Unfortunately it sucks running non-native
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Not only that, but it's a real letdown. I always have problems with my eyes and I was really looking forward to the big screen and the high res when I ordered my L220X because I figured I'll find a way to make everything bigger so I can sit far away and everything well be so clear and well defined and easy to see because of the high resolution and low pixel pitch.

I'm no programer but I can't imagine it'd be hard to instruct the computer to just draw the image larger. In fact I'd guess it's a very simple affair, but like I said I'm no expert. This problem is just going to get worse because monitors will have higher and higher resolutions and probably smaller and smaller pixel pitch.
 
This is an inherent problem resulting from assumptions made by operating system writers long ago. Windows allows you to change the DPI, but you've seen what happens when you do that (the results aren't pretty). Apple is working on what it calls "resolution independence" which would solve these problems, and planned to have it in Mac OS X 10.4, but doing the job right turned out to be such a long hard slog that they are still working on it.
 
I felt the same way about my 24", but I found that adjusting the DPI fixed the problem. It's not perfect, but it's much better.
 
what erks me is microsoft praised how well vista handled oversized DPI but in reality i dont find it that much different then XP.
 
evilsofa said:
This is an inherent problem resulting from assumptions made by operating system writers long ago.
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It's really interesting when you think about it. I guess they used the same algorithm in subsequent versions of windows as they did in the first one and there was no way that in those primitive times they could have predicted that way of doing it would cause problems. Well, they could have, but who was thinking about today's resolutions at today's pixel pitch at that time.

Apple is working on what it calls "resolution independence" which would solve these problems, and planned to have it in Mac OS X 10.4, but doing the job right turned out to be such a long hard slog that they are still working on it.
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Thanks for that one, I googled "resolution independence" and read up on why the size of the image changes with resolution. It's really interesting. I'd never have thought it'd be such a problem to get the computer to draw the elements independent of the pixel grid.

Wiki says:
"The Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft, and consequently, WPF applications, are also designed to be resolution-independent, which means that Windows Vista also supports resolution independence."

I guess that's just a broken promise, as Krupted says, huh?

Really when you think about it it's like we're seeing a small part of computer history. An old method which was acceptable before becomes a problem due to new technology witch it had not had in mind when it was being written.

So is there really no method out there to do this pixel grid independent drawing? I'd have thought someone out there developed something by now
 
I thought Vista was supposed to have leveraged the graphics driver to scale and achieve resolution independence...

(Or not, I just remember reading something vaguely about that...)
 
qwertz325 said:
Wiki says:
"The Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft, and consequently, WPF applications, are also designed to be resolution-independent, which means that Windows Vista also supports resolution independence."

I guess that's just a broken promise, as Krupted says, huh?
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Well, if you're talking about WPF specifically, it's not a broken promise. WPF is designed resolution-independence in mind. The problem is that most of todays applications are not written with WPF, so the changes it brings will be quite slow. Most companies are also used to developing their guis with Visual Studio's designer, which had horrible support for WPF until just few months ago when they released sp1. So right until now most people who were given the opportunity to either use WinForms with better tools or WPF, probably chose the former.
 
1920 x 1200 resolution a 15.4" laptop screen takes the cake in terms of having the smallest text size.
 
Phatency said:
Well, if you're talking about WPF specifically, it's not a broken promise. WPF is designed resolution-independence in mind. The problem is that most of todays applications are not written with WPF, so the changes it brings will be quite slow. Most companies are also used to developing their guis with Visual Studio's designer, which had horrible support for WPF until just few months ago when they released sp1. So right until now most people who were given the opportunity to either use WinForms with better tools or WPF, probably chose the former.
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I see, so in Vista any application that are written with WPF are drawn independent of the resolution while those that aren't are drawn according to the resolution?

Is there no method out there to allow system-wide resolution independent drawing?
 
qwertz325 said:
I see, so in Vista any application that are written with WPF are drawn independent of the resolution while those that aren't are drawn according to the resolution?
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Vista or XP, they both support WPF. The catch is: for the resolution independence to really work, your system-wide DPI MUST match your display's actual DPI, and you need to run your display in it's native resolution. If ithe DPI smaller, things appear smaller than intended and vise versa. So in the end you're going to screw all those WinForms applications which look ugly with DPI's other than 96.
Is there no method out there to allow system-wide resolution independent drawing?
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That wouldn't be possible, since all Win32/Winforms-applications (majority) uses physical pixels for measuring sizes, locations, etc. An automatic approach to converting physical pixels to some "relative" unit like WPF uses is not going to work, atleast not in every appliation. WPF itself uses "Device Independent Units" (DIU), which is defined as 1/96 of an inch. And provided that your screen resolution and DPI are right, a line with the length of 96 DIU's is going to be exactly 1 inch on every screen.
 
I remember reading about advancements that would make native resolution less important, but ultimately it still looked likely to be a 96 DPI world for some time to come. I guess Vista and time haven't changed that much...
 
qwertz325, have you thought about looking for a monitor with a standard larger pixel size? The 27" monitors have a .30 pixel size, so even native resolution will be somewhat magnified compared to a 24" and especially a 22".
 
Like Ryan_975 said, consider sitting closer to the monitor. I sit 16 to 20 inches from my 30" HP with a dpi setting of 101. It's easy to read text down to 6pt. Yes, I have to move my head from side to side when I'm working on a large drawing, just like I would if I were drawing on paper. Most people read books at a distance of 16-20 inches. Why would you sit farther away than that from a monitor? The short answer is: you shouldn't. I work with people who sit 4 -5 feet away from their 96 dpi monitor and most of them are constantly straining to see their work. I don't understand.

Gaming is a completely different application. A distance of 3-4 feet makes sense for gaming or videos.
 
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