This chapter isn't ready yet, it will contain information about the lifetime of backlights, differences between CRT and LCD displays, anti-aliasing with LCD displays, the ISO 13406-2 standard about pixel defects, a survey of common resolutions: VGA, SVGA, XGA and more soon. See also the screensaver chapter and the touchscreen section in the chapter Part III, “Tablet PCs / Pen PCs” Tablet PC and PDA.
lcdtest is a utility to display LCD monitor test patterns. It may be useful in finding pixels that are stuck on or off. lcdtest uses the SDL library, and has only been tested on Linux with X, but may work on other platforms.
DDCcontrol is a program used to control monitor parameters, like brightness and contrast, by software, i.e. without using the OSD (On Screen Display) and the buttons in front of the monitor.
fat8x16-x-font is a 8x16 pixel fixed width font to be used in physically small but high resolution displays. Such displays can be found for example in notebook computers with 1400x1050 and 1600x1200 14" displays.
pxl2000 is a free ISO 8859-15 (i.e. ISO 8859-1 with Euro symbol) encoded monowidth dot matrix typeface for the X Window system (X11). It is currently available in nine sizes: 4x8, 5x10, 6x12, 7x14, 8x16, 9x18, 10x20, 11x22 and 12x24 pixels. It's design objectives are:
Readability; fitness to be used as a default screen font, especially on reverse-color X11 terminals
Optimization for program code through visually distinct characters L, l, 1, 7, |, I, i and 0, O and more.
Complete ISO 8859-15 character set.
Many point sizes to ensure optical consistency across different computers with different screen resolutions (encompassing anything from PDA displays to 20" screens).
Fitness for displaying ASCII art and codework/code poetry, from viewing graphics in aview, watching TV in ttv and DVDs in mplayer with -vo aa to reading mailinglists like _arc.hive_, 7-11 and writing in mutt.
Clean, minimalist visual design; no serifs, a square minuscule base matrix, rounded edges. This is a computer terminal font; it should not look like a low-res imitation of print type.
The author Florian Cramer employs this font in his "anti-desktop" setup consisting of the ratpoison window manager and GNU screen inside an rxvt terminal (with reverse color and no scrollbars), similar to what is described in this FreshMeat article .