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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