Guideline E: Input and output interfaces

E9: Consistent presentation

Providing consistent presentation intensity

The vertical and horizontal intensities on some CRT (cathode ray tube) displays are unequal and some LCD (liquid crystal display) monitors may have a few bad pixels scattered across the screen. Additional compensation is required to display the letter E equally bright. This may not be possible for complex characters that require all the resolution that a LCD or CRT display can offer. Complex characters may need to be drawn with single vertical and horizontal lines. Readability suffers if the vertical lines are less bright than their horizontal counterparts.

Guideline E9

Ensure that the display brightness or print density of a character element is consistent regardless of the orientation of the element.

The solution here is simple. Either make the character bigger, or use a display of finer resolution and quality.

Note that modern displays can now have better quality resolution for complex characters even at smaller point sizes by using fonts (discussed later in another chapter). Fonts, such as the IBM WorldType font, can contain complete sets of characters and symbols to support languages and scripts from around the world. They may have embedded bitmaps for better screen quality at small point sizes to provide support for Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese ideographic characters that require fine resolution and high quality.