[time-nuts] What size graphs do people like? (How big is your screen?)

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Mon Aug 6 14:23:12 UTC 2012


On 8/5/12 10:35 PM, Hal Murray wrote:
>
> david-taylor at blueyonder.co.uk said:
>> I load screen shots into Corel Photo Paint 8 and resample the image to a
>> good size for a web page somewhere between 600 and 800 pixels horizontally.
>
> Where did 600 or 800 come from?

800 is historical, as is 640 (resolution of VGA adapter)

I use 800x600 (or thereabouts) a lot when converting a photograph to 
something reasonable to paste into a document. finer than 72 pixels/inch 
(which I'm sure comes from printer's points, and was tied to the 
resolution of dot matrix printers).  You want something where the pixel 
size is small enough that when someone is reading the doc, it doesn't 
look too bad, but also isn't huge.

Obviously a scalable vector form would be better, but not every program 
generates them.  Overall, I have the best luck (ultimately generating 
docs in MS Word or Powerpoint) with having tools like matlab squirt them 
out as enhanced meta files.  But once into the MS environment, you 
pretty much have to stay there.  It doesn't work well going back and 
forth between, say, Open Office and MS Office.

This kind of thing is where the inconsistencies between OO and MSO show up.

I suppose .ps and LaTeX would work, but those have their issues as well 
(when distributing or rendering... there's a lot of ugly font 
substitutions out there.)


WHile I like nice typography and layout as much as the next person, I 
also think we spend too much time on it.  I'm all for double spaced 
Courier, numbered sections, and being done with it.


>
> I don't care what the answer is.  I'm just curious and/or want to make graphs
> that most people can easily use.
>
> Here are 3 samples:
>    http://www.megapathdsl.net/~hmurray/time-nuts/coax/Front-5ns-1200x800.png
>    http://www.megapathdsl.net/~hmurray/time-nuts/coax/Front-5ns-800x600.png
>    http://www.megapathdsl.net/~hmurray/time-nuts/coax/Front-5ns-640x480.png
>
>




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