large fonts look ugly

[Aleksey]

I've got a little problem here. I have a laptop with display resolution
1400x1050 and the default screen fonts are kind of small. Well, not even
small, tiny. It's quite hard to read.

To make the fonts a little easier to my eyes I change the default font
resolution from 96 dpi to 120 dpi. It makes all fonts system-wide look
larger and it's easier to read. But! As fonts change the overall look and
feel also changes, and not in a good way. Everything becomes slightly
disproportional: controls, menus, start button, window titlebar buttons,
fonts (alas, even fonts). To make the matter worse, some applications still
display small fonts and some display partly small partly large. I can't
stand it. For me it's just plain ugly.

Designers at Microsoft clearly didn't spend much time on optimizing the look
of Windows for other than default 96 dpi fonts. I can't find another
explanation for this significant difference between the default theme of
Windows XP which is nice and smooth, and the theme with large fonts -
everything is out of proportion.

That's even more sad because monitors capable of high resolution are
becoming more and more widespread. For laptops it's already a norm to have
1400x1050. Desktop LCDs mostly have 1280x960 except for 15 inch models
which are in minority.

Maybe Longhorn will be different? Will it bring any good news for me? I
hope some work is being done to make the next version of Windows look better
in this respect, I really do.

 

[Steve N.]

I've got a little problem here. I have a laptop with display resolution
1400x1050 and the default screen fonts are kind of small. Well, not even
small, tiny. It's quite hard to read.

To make the fonts a little easier to my eyes I change the default font
resolution from 96 dpi to 120 dpi. It makes all fonts system-wide look
larger and it's easier to read. But! As fonts change the overall look and
feel also changes, and not in a good way. Everything becomes slightly
disproportional: controls, menus, start button, window titlebar buttons,
fonts (alas, even fonts). To make the matter worse, some applications still
display small fonts and some display partly small partly large. I can't
stand it. For me it's just plain ugly.

Designers at Microsoft clearly didn't spend much time on optimizing the look
of Windows for other than default 96 dpi fonts. I can't find another
explanation for this significant difference between the default theme of
Windows XP which is nice and smooth, and the theme with large fonts -
everything is out of proportion.

That's even more sad because monitors capable of high resolution are
becoming more and more widespread. For laptops it's already a norm to have
1400x1050. Desktop LCDs mostly have 1280x960 except for 15 inch models
which are in minority.

Maybe Longhorn will be different? Will it bring any good news for me? I
hope some work is being done to make the next version of Windows look better
in this respect, I really do.

1400x1050 is rediculously small on all but the very largest of displays.
Don't let Windows tell you what is supposedly "best" for you, set it to
1024x768 or 1152x864 and reset your font size. Just because something is
possible doesn't make it a good thing to do. Unless you're doing some
serious zoomed-in graphics work having that high of a resolution is a
waste of resources and your eyesight.

Steve

 

[Aleksey]

1400x1050 is rediculously small on all but the very largest of
displays. Don't let Windows tell you what is supposedly "best" for
you, set it to 1024x768 or 1152x864 and reset your font size. Just
because something is possible doesn't make it a good thing to do.
Unless you're doing some serious zoomed-in graphics work having that
high of a resolution is a waste of resources and your eyesight.

Steve

Don't forget that it's a laptop I have. You don't really get to choose the
resolution of the laptop LCD display. Lower resolutions are often rendered
poorly by laptops' less capable video cards.