Those who care about clarity when reading from screens, may like to read this long account from a Microsoft engineer of the improvements to ClearType in the new Windows 7, including a new ClearType Tuner. ClearType is absolutely vital if you want to use your laptop as if it were an ebook reader.
I’ve used the Tuner (my desktop is now running on Windows 7 RC) and it works well, although the personalised changes it makes are very subtle. ClearType is enabled by default in Windows 7.
Those who are not going to plough through the article may still be interested to read the key findings…
* We’ve measured an improvement in word recognition accuracy of 17% using ClearType over bi-level rendering.
* We’ve found a 5% speed improvement in reading speed and a 2% improvement in comprehension (this is remarkable) using ClearType
XP and Vista have ClearType — but I don’t think it’s enabled by default in XP, and there’s no Tuner in Vista (the Tuner is an optional download). Given the figures above, it sounds like students would benefit from having a canteen “ClearType tuning surgery” for their laptops, during the Autumn term.
Oh, and there’s another nice if rather minor benefit for Windows 7 users. W7 comes with a native standalone XPS reader, XPS being the “XML paper specification” which is a competitor to PDF. Sadly the XPS reader/viewer appears to have no sample XPS documents, although you can download the official Microsoft sample pack here. It’s primitive as a reader, but unlike Acrobat Reader, XPS Reader automatically shows pages in two-up view (aka ‘facing’) when in full-screen mode. In Acrobat you need to burrow into Edit / Preferences / Full Screen / Uncheck box to “Fill screen with one page at a time” to get a two-up page display in full-screen mode.