Help for screen text

Here is the reason why you get a headache reading more than a little text on your screen, and the reason why all Web designers encourage you to use only small chunks of text. If you multiply the width of an individual pixel by 2000, you get the distance beyond which text or images look smooth. With 93 pixels per inch, a pixel is 1/93 inch wide, and 2000 times that is 21.5 inches. Most of us read our monitors from significantly closer than 21.5 inches, so our eyes are continually irritated by resolving individual pixels that make the text jagged and hard to read.

Now for the new news. Microsoft's ClearType takes advantage of the fact that any laptop's LCD screen represents each pixel by 3 small, vertical bars colored red, green, and blue (R, G, and B). If you don't believe us, just use that magnifying glass again. By selecting which of these individual bars to turn on, rather than just turning on entire 3-bar pixels, ClearType can position a white pixel 3 times more finely. For examples, instead of turning on one pixel's RGB bars, it can turn on two adjacent pixels' BRG bars, to move a white dot 1/3 of a pixel to the left, or turn on GBR, to move it 1/3 of a pixel to the right. If a quick sketch of RGBRGBRGBRGB does not make this obvious, see the excellent description and demonstration of "sub-pixel font rendering" technology (and its actual invention by The Great Woz for the Apple II Computer around 1979) see Gibson Research Corporation's Web site at http://www.grc.com. Note that the bars and their control hardware are already present, so ClearType imposes no additional hardware cost, and we expect no noticeable additional software cost. (This does not work for CRT tubes, which do not address their individual color sub-pixels.)

So what does this mean to you? With ClearType, an LCD screen's effective resolution for text triples, such as from 93 to 279. This is close to the resolution of print. For the first time, ever, it will allow extensive reading of text on computer screens. This, in turn, will make it reasonable for you to post large amounts of text, which compassion would previously have forced you to hand out on paper or assign in a textbook. You can take advantage of this to reduce your operating expenses and increase your own overall productivity. You can even help solve students' back problems caused by lugging around stacks of thousand-page tomes.

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