Landscape or Portrait


The one problem with  1024 x 1024 resolution colours  monitors and graphics  adapters  is their cost. A 1024 x 768 Super VGA display may not seem that for away from that desired resolution and it  much cheaper. The trouble is that  for an A4 page  the aspect  ratio is wrong – that is a Super VGA monitor is a landscape  monitor with 1024 pixels across the  screen. This makes it suitable  for full page  illustration  work or even for  viewing spreadsheets, but it isn’t much good for DTP work which nearly  always works with pages that are  longer than they are  wide.  There are a number of  solutions to  this problem. The first is the  obvious  hardware solution of turning the  monitor one its side to converting it to a portrait  monitors. This isn’t  quite as easy as a  it sounds because  you not only need to  alter the way  that the monitor is  mounted, but you also need special  video drivers   that turn the image through  the same right  angle! There are  a number of VGA  adapter cards that  support a rotated  display,  the best known example of which  is the Radius  Pivot.  This consists  of a specially designed Super VGA  card and a  monitor which  pivots. The  driver can detect  the orientation of the monitor  and so automatically switch  the  display from landscape to portrait interactively. This is an ideal display if you need  to work in   both landscape  and portrait  mode.

As alternative  software-only  solution is  to use a driver that creates a language  virtual screen using RAM. The actual  video display is then  used as a  window into  this larger display.  The advantage of this is that  the driver can also automatically  detect when the  mouse pointer is  about to be moved  off the edge of  the screen and   can move the  window to  show another  portion of the screen. The best known examples  of this approach  are SoftKicker for Venture GEM and  more Windows which work with any  Windows 3 application. These products  only work with  standard  and not Super VGA  but they still do  a good job of simulating  a full A4 display in monochrome and in colours.


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