Henrik Gedenryd <Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se> wrote:
> Lex Spoon wrote:
> 
> > Man, after all this talk I'm really wishing I had such a UI available
> > right now, even though I've got a plain ~100dpi monitor!  I think I
> > could live with 50% larger font sizes in return for such a convenient
> > and scalable UI framework.
> 
> I think the reason why no one is doing this yet is that you need to get up
> to resolutions above 300 dpi or so before it won't look really ugly, today's
> pixels are far too discernible one by one. As an example, imagine what an
> every-other-pixel pattern at 72dpi will look like at 96 dpi. This is not the
> way you would specify things, of course, but the same effects would occurr
> often, where some distances yielding 1 pixel spaces at 72 would yield 2 at
> 96, etc., and that would look really bad. Going from 300 to 400 would not
> yield the same problem (4 vs. 5 pixels in the two cases).
> 

I'm not sure where you'd have these pixel patterns.  Most video cards
can handle 16-bit color at least, and so it's not needed for dithering. 
And anti-aliasing usually only effects neighboring pixels, not large
swaths.

To get an idea what such a system would be like on *your* monitor ("you"
being anyone on the list), just look at a PDF file with anti-aliasing
turned on.  I find that things look fuzzy, but they are quite usable if
you increase the font size by 50%.


> I just realized that the dominating dpi size hasn't changed significantly
> since the bitmapped displays were invented. But it'll have to once
> everything is 32 bit color, or how else would you improve your product?
> 

Maybe you're right.  Still, I wonder if it's more a problem that there's
no market as long as GUI's aren't resolution-scalable.  It looks like a
catch 22: nobody wants high-res video cards and monitors because they
are useless for most GUI's.  And yet, if the high-res video cards and
monitors were available, the GUI's would surely improve within a few
years (perhaps Microsoft would catch on in five or ten :)).

Interestingly, video cards for polygon-based games are out of this loop,
because such games use scalable graphics already....


-Lex