Or so I keep telling myself. I have always been a fan of small fonts. Maybe it was just the old school web designer in me, or maybe it was because for years I have tried to cram as much real estate onto my desktop as possible. I remember looking (and sometimes laughing) at screenshots of other desktops with their seemingly HUGE 16 pixel typeface and thinking, “Jeesh, they can barely fit one application into a space where I have four!”
Well…that all changed for me recently. For the past two months I have spent a great deal of time in front of my 15″ laptop screen–juggling four on-line courses, paid design work, and my usual duties as an Arch Linux developer. A few weeks ago I noticed I was getting headaches much more frequently than I’m used to. I also became aware that their intensity was directly proportional to the amount of time spent ‘at the keys’.
For a bit of background, my desktop consists of a 15″ widescreen LCD at 1680×1050. It is normally set to 100 dpi, with Arial 8pt for GUI stuff and Dina 13px for terminal applications.
I began experimenting with my desktop config last week, trying darker and low contrasting colour schemes in a vain attempt to ease the strain on my eyes. After each significant change, I’d go back to my routine for a couple of days to get acclimated. Despite this, nothing seemed to help and before long another headache would set in.
At some point I realized it wasn’t so much the contrast level that was bothering me, but rather my ability to focus on large blocks of text for extended periods of time. That’s when I decided to tweak my fonts.
The result? It’s been about a week now and I haven’t suffered a single headache. Not only that, but I can now sit comfortably in my chair without unconsciously leaning over my keys! And In case anyone is wondering the obvious…yes, I already wear glasses–a very light and up-to-date prescription.
For anyone interested, here’s what has changed:
I bumped the dpi/ppi from 100dpi to it’s natural setting of 124x125dpi (determined by X’s DisplaySize settings and the physical measurements of the screen (13″ x 8.3″)). This made an enormous difference for most GUI applications, with the exception of Firefox.
For Firefox, I have forced the minimum font size to 13, though I may bump it to 14 in the near future. It is not an ideal solution as there are several instances where small fonts are appropriate (sidebar text, etc.) however there’s no easy way to discern the body of a page from peripheral elements.
Lastly, for the terminal I’m still using Dina, but now at it’s maximum size of 16 pixels. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a decent console font any larger than that without jumping up to a 20px Terminus.