On Tuesday 01 April 2008, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

> One of the things I don't like about black background is that on all
> monitors
> the background seems to "crowd" the glyphs -- the markings seems more
> slender than when the colors are reversed.  With small fonts (I like
> high resolution settings for other reasons), this makes the lettering
> hard to read.

If you were using an oldish crt I would suggest that is "blooming" - 
lots of white in the picture increase electron beam current which 
enlarges the picture somewhat. Black backgrounds are in reverse. But 
you are seeing this on lcds as well, so it looks like an "optical 
illusion", like the old favourite of which line is longer:

<--------->
>---------<

Dunno what one can do about that it, it comes down to how the brain 
decodes the signals on the optic nerve...

> > You seem to know what to do in most cases and how to achieve it, so
> > I don't know if my favourite colour schemes will help you much.
> > However, have you considered an eye test for colour sensitivity? A
> > large number of males are under-sensitive to certain colours and
> > it's apparently hard for the person to detect it in themselves.
>
> I'm glad it seems so, since I teach computer science at the
> university level.  :o)
> But I was hoping to get samples and suggestions of how others have
> dealt with this.  I've been muttering under my breath about this for
> a few years now and I thought it likely that others may have taken
> action.
>
> As for vision: I have such an exam yearly.  I always see the numerals
> in their
> samples, and nobody's ever mentioned color insensitivity.
> Nevertheless, it's possible it's vision-related since it works this
> way for me on all monitors, and
> in my work I see a lot of monitors.

Me too, and to me they all look more or less the same :-) In my case, I 
have 7 years worth of fixing the things and critically examining the 
display quality when calibrating and adjusting them. I've developed an 
automatic gain control in my head that compensates for differences :-)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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