Posted by Jim Higson on 09/14/05 12:14

Spartanicus wrote:

> Jim Higson <jh@333.org> wrote:

>>As an aside, I used to actually quite like the effect of a CRT at
>>resolutions above what the dot pitch said it could handle. So long as it
>>didn't bring down the refresh rate, the low-GPU fake antialiasing in games
>>looked fine
>
> Fair enough if you prefer to trade in a certain loss of definition for
> an aesthetic effect.

The question is moot now I have a TFT, but in games I sometimes miss the
less-than-square pixels of my CRT.

>>Hmmm... what is the current state of vector interfaces? I think I read
>>somewhere GNOME uses lazy rasterised SVG for all icons etc. I might have
>>been reading about a future version, mind.
>
> I'm not particularly familiar with GNOME and the likes. To solve the
> problem on Windows would require a fundamental change in the OS, and
> many of the applications that run on it. Vector based UI elements could
> impose a resource penalty. Given the backward compatibility problems, I
> can imagine that OS developers are not eager to change to such a system.
> The benefits would only really become evident with future hardware. That
> said, I occasionally use a Dell laptop with a 147PPI resolution screen,
> and these are already really uncomfortable to use due to this issue.

I don't know if this would be such a big thing. The icons I use are all
prerasterised SVG anyway (see
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=8341) and a decent image
rendering library should be able to gloss over the difference in image
formats, even for formats as diverse as PNG/SVG.

I don't know if the Windows icons are vector, but they're redrawing them for
Vista anyway, and are probably using vector tools. Vector rendering isn't
really any slower when you use the GPU anyway, see
http://www.cairographics.org/introduction for an interesting read on this.

>>Maybe future very high res screens are where Opera will gain greater use,
>>because it can zoom the bitmapped parts as well as increase the text size.
>
> Apart from the OS UI elements, the effect of high resolution screens on
> bitmapped content should also be considered. It may become necessary to
> integrate high quality image resizing into the OS to handle the variety
> of output resolutions. To get the benefit content providers such as web
> authors may need to provide oversized bitmapped content, or make bitmaps
> available in multiple sizes.

Rather than provide one version for mobile devices, one for normal and one
for high-res, I think I'd rather just give the client a gzipped SVG. That
way any dot pitch, present and future is supported.

Maybe by the time these displays are common, SVG support will be also.

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