[techtalk] Screen colours :-)

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 08:26:06PM +1100 or thereabouts, Jenn V. wrote:
 
> > What do you people prefer as colours for extended viewing of text? :-)
> 
> Black on white, always. White on black is literally painful!
> For me.

I remember when I started using X finding that the combinations of
colours that I thought I would like actually gave me a headache.
Some messing with my .fvwm2rc later, I found some pale green, lilacs
and neutral browns which I liked for backgrounds and stuck to 
black text. 

Changing windowmanagers and using Gnome, I had transparent terminals
which showed a very dark background, with a light grey (it looked
white but wasn't so glary) for the letters.

Now I have the default theme for windowmaker, I think, showing 
through: a purplish colour with white (which I suspect to be pale 
grey, again) text. And a panel of greens and greys. They're not
bright. I find them restful!

I was interested to hear from a friend that greens and lilac/purple
are said to be good for people with long sight; and that ambers and
(I think) reds are sometimes better for short-sighted people (which
includes me). He thinks this is pretty standard, but I appear to be
an exception.

If I'm looking at something in postscript, however, I prefer black
on white, which ghostview does. Dunno why. And generally, for
-extended- viewing of something, I prefer it on paper :)

I think that url that someone mentioned earlier was right, too. 
It's not just the colours, or the fonts. It's the combination.
I love the dec terminal font on the screen, but I'm not so keen
on it when printed out. And I can cope with the black-on-white
of postscript stuff better than I would cope with black-on-white
on a window.

Telsa

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