Thursday, January 05, 2006
The Display Resolutions Dilema
A few days ago, I posted a message about display resolutions, font smoothing, screen sizes, and related issues on my general development blog. It seems that issues like display resolution are rather simple, yet there is a lot of complexity hidden here. Us Fox developers know a bit about that, since in the past we had to move from FoxPro DOS to FoxPro Windows via "Foxels" rather than pixels.
However, there is a lot more to know about screen resolutions, which is why I ultimately ended up posting a article-size message about how screen resolution is measured, why standardized resolution measuring is completely broken in Windows today, why it is hard to read lots of text on the screen, and how to build applications that are both resolution independent and very crisp due do much higher resolutions than applications can achieve today.
In short: Anything we look at should be at a resolution of at least 300dpi. Ideally even 600dpi or 1200dpi. Today, we are nowhere near that (generally 96dpi). This is a major problem for many industries, and current generation Windows apps that are based on GDI, can not break through this massive roadblock. This is one of the major reasons why practically nobody reads a book on the computer and why so many people like to print out reports. "Avalon" (or the "Windows Presentation Foundation", I should say) aims to provide a solution. In fact, providing a solution to this very problem is one of the major purposes of Avalon.
So anyway, check out my post. Some of the pixels, points, dpi, and resolution measurements may not be what you think they are. I think there might be a few details even advanced developers are not aware of...
Posted @ 7:19 PM by Egger, Markus (markus@code-magazine.com) - Comments