Posted inInformation Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Have You Ever Noticed How Windows Fonts SUCK?

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

Recently I’ve had to do some work for what _has_ to be the last company on the face of the planet still using Windows for anything. Since I did not wish to install that virus on any machine I had I purchased a refurbished I-7 HP Slimline quad core. I loaded it up with 16Gig of RAM, a 6Gig/second 1TB SATA drive and some NVidia card with 384 CUDA core. Far from the best machine I have, but no slouch. Even though I was doing Linux work for them you had to do it with a Windows machine. If you plugged anything into the network which wasn’t Windows the network weenies shut down the connection. I guess they wanted their network to be fully overrun by hackers instead of reasonably defended.

After I left the client site I was “on-call” so I had to move that machine over to my primary desk and put my better machines over on the BOINC rack. It also gave me an excuse to use idle time to dust off an ancient copy of Star Craft instead of doing something useful like blogging or writing another book. Most of you probably have noticed I haven’t blogged much lately. I’m only a few campaigns from the end of the expansion disk so I should be full on blogging pretty soon.

The wretched part about having this Windows machine on my primary desk is that I’ve had to use it for writing. Yes, I can still pull FocusWriter, LibreOffice and the Atom text editor for this machine, but even after doing that it still sucks. The fonts are wretched! My IPS monitor now looks like some el-cheapo 9-pin dot-matrix printer has banged out each character. I even dusted off an license for EditPlus which I used to use decades ago and found pretty functional, it too has horrible fonts.

This is NOT a hardware problem. I have the machine set up to dual boot Ubuntu (soon to be Mint 18) and the fonts are beautiful. They are solid on the screen, pleasing to the eye. When this machine is running Windows and I’m writing, inside of an hour I have to put my glasses on. Less than an hour later I get headaches which start at the very top of my head. By noon I’m done. I have to go work outside or talk to people on the phone. I’m physically incapable of working in my office.

When I’m back on the farm my clock radio starts playing WBEZ around 5:40am. After I listen to the business news segment and a bit else I manage to roll out of bed and finish my morning routine. This has me out in my office before 7:30am. (No, my office isn’t in my house, it is in a different building.) By noon I’ve had over 4 hours in front of my monitors.

Why did I bother telling you that? Because when I boot Ubuntu on this machine to do my writing, I work until lunch without my glasses or headaches. After lunch I come back and keep going. Some days of the week I will come out to work another 2-3 hours. When I feel the urge to put my glasses on is when I quit.

Same fonts, same point size, same hardware, same editor/word processor, but the experience is sooooo much easier on the eyes.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.