25 Apr
2016
25 Apr
'16
5:15 p.m.
On Mon, 25 Apr 2016, Toby Thain wrote:
Incorrect. Scalable system (& third party) fonts
have been with us for
more than 30 years, as I said.
Though you are quite correct, it doesn't mean that scalable fonts are
everywhere. They might be present more or less everywhere in MacOS and
maybe even Windows, too. However, there are two problems. One is that it's
(currently) a big hassle in Windows to get absolutely every font to get
bigger at once. Trust me, I tried. For example, you might make the title
bar bigger, but the text underneath button icons might be immutable (and
thus microscopic). I expect this will change in the future as folks adopt
Apple's solution where they can sort of interpolate (maybe that's the wrong
term in this case) the view of what you are seeing. I'm guessing you know
what I mean. If that happens, I might decide I *love* high res screens.
What you are saying is fundamentally sound, ie.. more pixels mean more
detail and readability. It's just the current state of the art that's no
fun.
My other (personal) issue is that I use a lot of oddball operating systems
that don't have and will never have good support for scalable fonts which
can easily be adapted for ultra-high-res. So, I just stick with old
monitors and specialty stuff (like the Samsung 210T).
OS X 10.3 shipped with subpixel rendering on LCD as
has Windows Cleartype
for many years.
Which is, I agree, great for readability. Now if there was just a universal
one-stop place to double my font sizes in every OS (or even the same OS)...
:-)
-Swift