Thursday, April 25, 2013

High contrast option in Windows to appease reading and editing.

There have been many inventions, like the e-book reader, that allow to look at a steady screen for long hours without compromising the optical organs.

As more e-book readers are sold, the prices will lower to the point of being accessible like a cheap $15 cell phone. The Amazon Kindle is sold in USA for $60 .

If one wants to edit text or other high contrasting images(which are the most stressful for the eyes), e.g. a notepad file with a bunch of subtitles with their timings, like in my case:








The requirements are none. Just press «Shift»+«Alt»+«Print Screen» and you will prompted with a message asking whether you are sure to enter High contrast mode. Once you have clicked on «OK», the background which tends to be white will be black, and the text which tends to be black will be white. This is much easier on the eyes.

The other aspect you can change in your computer monitor and graphics card options is to increment the vertical update frequency to the maximum available for the hardware combination. Most modern monitors support 60Hz, but the high end ones may reach 120Hz and perhaps 240Hzs. The higher the frequency the less eyestrain you will experience.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

どちらがいい? "," とか «,»

A note on text style for tutorials and subtitles(captions if it is the same language as the played audio).


I was in a dilemma as to what type quotations to use in captions and text tutorials, regarding special words or input(I only knew that " and ' existed). Figuring out that by pressing «Alt»+«0171» in any QWERTY Windows keyboard one can obtain the « character; and by pressing «Alt»+«0187» one obtains the » character; I decided to use both characters « and » in subtitled words that indicate mutable concepts or options selected or input by the user.

In text formats, as in this very example, I generally use italics for newly introduced concepts(like in the first usage of the " « " and " » " characters in this very blog post) and bold style for highlighting text. Since those are not supported by the SubRIP specification I will avoid such highlights. For immutable and predefined strings I will use the double quotes("") encompassing it, and for alleged characteristics(perhaps with a hint of sarcasm) I will use single quotes('') encompassing it.

Using spaces before and after quotations, e.g. :

  • Input « "hallelujah Bro!" » on the input box.
  • At the right side of the left column, we can read " "He will be angry about it. Honestly." " 


Is the solution I have come up with for avoiding ambiguity between instruction indicative quotations and literal quotations(like in the second example, a direct speech, AKA non reported).