screen fonts question

[Mike Lee]

John Shriver complains...

>All I want is a font that is clear on my not-so-perfectly converged 3/160C
>display.  All the serif fonts get hoplessly sparkly.

I have had a similar problem in that I wear somewhat computer-nerdish
glasses for my nearsightedness and they suffer me chromatic aberration on
my otherwise perfect Sony monitor.  People who have extended their monitor
cables and not kept the lengths of the four cables exactly the same may
also be interested, although I haven't tried it myself.

I would suggest that you use the -f and -b options to suntools to set your
foreground to an additive primary color (i.e. red, green, or blue) and
your background to black. Your background could also be an extra-dark
shade of the foreground.  You will then only be seeing the image from a
single electron beam, which will probably be aligned with itself very
nicely.

I have found that light green on dark gray is eminently readable and is a
good compromise between too much contrast (against a black background, for
example) and a vomit-like color scheme (light green on dark_green, for
example).  You could try reds or blues, but green will most likely be
easier on the old balls.  The exact color triplets I use are:

  suntools -f 0 255 200  -b 70 70 70

The gray background covers up reflections from light sources outside the
monitor (what, you mean there is more to the world than my computer
monitor?).  The foreground triplet is an exact match for the color of my
old Televideo 955 monochrome terminal.  If you haven't already, use
defaultsedit to change your rootwindow pattern to gray. 

Since your problem seems to be more severe, try a lower blue value with
the foreground, perhaps 0 255 100.  I tried that, and text was perfectly
readable even after I set the convergence controls to their extremes.  It
will take a while to get used to that color though.  If you like that
healthy green glow in your face, swap the foreground and background
colors.

There is a program (coloredit?) that comes on the same tape as the manual
pages.  You can use it to experiment with colors without having to specify
them numerically.  If don't have the tapes, you can type it in from the
"Sunview Programmers Guide" appendix A.9.  It's in one of those weird
three-ring optical drives with the 10,000,000,000 ns access time.

Delicious Demons,

Mike Lee
Ontek Corp

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