Indeed. There are 256 gradations each of red, green, and blue in each pixel of a computer screen. That’s three bytes per pixel. Using 7-bit encoding, that’s eight characters every seven pixels, and we aren’t limited to the simplistic character set shown here. If your computer monitor can display at least 2.75 megapixels, you can view the entire Bible at once. There may be a slight learning curve though.
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What about the 8-bit alpha channel? That could also be used to increase density, with some (comparatively minor) loss of readability
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“This book requires Dolby Vision to properly display. Some passages may be seared upon your eyeballs. Use caution”
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all we’re missing is an alternative decoding that creates a completely different, intelligible but incompatible, set of religious texts. then we’re all set
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That must be how you get Republican Jesus
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I don’t disagree with the assertion that it’s of limited use today, or that graphic designers squander many, many, more pixels on things far less important than legible text(and, with the grey-on-grey fad, sometimes they actively avoid that).
What interests me, though, is that I can’t think of any retrocomputing examples of someone hitting this particular level of aggressiveness back when it would actually have been quite helpful; and when ‘computing’ was an area of endeavor that you didn’t really wander into without some willingness to learn cryptic things and just throwing more screen at the problem was somewhere between ‘painfully expensive’ and ‘literally not for sale’.
The really, really, classic binary representations are obviously pretty cryptic; and most classic terminal fonts are on the rough side; but all the ones I can think of were definitely attempts at legibility, despite the fact that going with something like this could probably have doubled your column count(or, perhaps more usefully at the time, a horizontally-focused variant of this could have doubled your row count).
Anyone know of an instance where someone did make that design choice?
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I’m always cautioning people who build things to display on computers to remember the prevalence of color blindness.
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You’d be surprised at how many graphic designers have taken it as almost a personal insult that I can’t tell red from green. Even though I have the most mild form of colorblindness possible, and most colorblind people have way worse color vision than I do.
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The nice thing about reading on a kindle is that you can adjust the font and type size. The bad thing about reading on a kindle is that it doesn’t support a lot of well established typographical conventions-- the pdfs of oreilly books always seem to be prettier than the kindle versions Terry Pratchett’s foot notes work better as footnotes than they do as endnotes. Math formulas look ugly as jpegs etc.
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Yeah, I’m still wondering why there isn’t an e-reader as well as a format for them fully compatible with LaTeX.
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That said, there are some color palettes that attempt to be distinguishable even with profound color blindness. I like Plasma for color scales and infographics
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html
ETA: better link, but I can’t find the one I’m looking for
https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-advice/
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