Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!vanvleck!uwmcsd1!marque!gryphon!richard
From: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Preferences colours, was (Re: Icon manipulation programs.)
Message-ID: <4655@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Date: 27 Jun 88 06:34:10 GMT
Reply-To: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton)
Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, CA
Lines: 49

In article <2507@amiga.UUCP> jimm@cloyd.UUCP (Jim Mackraz) writes:
>
>)Did that make sense?  Has anyone ever thought of this before?  It doesn't
>)sound very hard to me.  Does everyone *really* use white on blue?
>
>Another big advantage of dark on light, is that the dark horizontal
>inter-line gaps only dice up light things.  So rather than having 
>striated characters that look like something from CGA, you get a 
>horizontal texture to your background and full characters: looks real
>sharp.

I remember reading some SIGGRAPH paper on colour perception, and there
was an interesting remark made by one of them Xerox PARC types to the
effect that the reason dark letters on light backgrounds was
preferable (ie. induced less eyestrain) was that when some light
text on a dark background scrolls, the persistence of the phosphour
guarentees that a smeary residual image exists for a small peroid
of time and (somehow) casues eyestrain. But with dark letters
on a light background, when you scroll text, *poof* there
is no smearing because the light background immediately erases
the ``old'' dark letters.

I use a tan background, with a dark gray/light black text colour.
Since there is less contrast between these two colours then
any other (readable) color pair I've found, flicker, in interlace
mode (which I use almost exclusivly) is negligable.

Here are my pref colours:

Colour 0: 13, 12, 9   Tan
Colour 1:  5,  5, 5   Dark grey
Colour 2: 15, 15, 1   Yellow
Colour 3: 15, 11, 0   Orange

(P.S. to whoever maintains the "preferences" programme - how about
putting in the numeric values of the RGB selections - it's a pain
to count click to set/read specific RGB values)

I have a Sony, if that makes any difference.

Also of note, it that same group of Xerox weenies that concluded
that dark on light wa the way to go also concluded that 2 was
the optimal number of mouse buttons. Oh well, guess Apple didn't
steal everything :-)


-- 
      If you were to flatten out Wales, it would be bigger than England.
richard@gryphon.CTS.COM                               {backbone}!gryphon!richard