Desktop Metaphor

[Peter Corlett]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 01:19:37PM -0600, ben via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> That may be true but DOS/WINDOWS and APPLE II all had TV display output
> formats, now it is WIDE SCREEN ONLY. From what little I have seen about the
> Alto, you had a full sized 8x10? page format. The printed page DOES matter
> for graphic displays. Try and find a printed page size PDF reader, or one a
> tad smaller. Reading a PDF on a KINDLE DOES NOT WORK. I suspect a good PDF
> reader, a not tablet, is needed often for all the online doc's at places like
> bit savers to get the knowledge close to a classic computer.

The Kindle is cheap crap optimised to sell Amazon eBooks. Any feature that does
not directly push you to give more money to Amazon is made virtually unusable.
This includes its PDF reader. I gave mine away in disgust.

I suspect that you also have a cheap crap monitor or laptop which uses a nasty
1080p TV panel. They have a much lower resolution than the printed page, so of
course it's going to look like crap. A4 is 11.69" tall, and squeezing that into
1080 pixels gives you 92DPI - worse than fax. Rotating the screen into portrait
mode gives more pixels, but now the limit is fitting the 8.27" wide document
into 1080 pixels, or 130DPI. (Obviously, these are DPIs of the source, not the
scaled image on your monitor.)

I have a 15" 2880 by 1800 display on my laptop, which has a pretty good PDF
reader which will show two pages side-by-side. The resolution is high enough
that it's as good as reading off paper, albeit scaled down to about 70% because
the screen is physically smaller than A4.

Plug my laptop into a nice HiDPI monitor -- or indeed any good-enough laptop
into one of those cheap 4K monitors which use scummy UHD TV panels -- and PDFs
become gloriously large and crisp. Go on, find €300 or so and treat yourself to
a new display.