Question about font sizing in Windows

[m1911owner]

I'm currently running Windows 2000 with Office 2000.  I'm also afflicted with "Over 40 eyes", meaning that I need to have stuff big enough that I can actually see it.

19 inch LCD monitors at 1280x1024 have a decent pixel pitch for me, under Windows 2000.  I've played with some of the bigger monitors, like the 23" widescreen ones, and find that the pixels are too small for my eyes.

I know that Windows 2000 allows you to scale the font size for display pitch.  But... I've found that it doesn't work very well.  Some things adjust, and some things stay the same size.  Also, the scaling isn't all that great--on the fine-pitch monitors, you get more pixels in the characters, but the strokes tend to be too narrow.  Until they flip to two pixels wide, and then it's too heavy.

But... I've observed that recent versions of Acrobat to a fantastic job of font scaling.  Grab the corner of the window and stretch, and the font is beautiful at every size.

Thus, I have an existence proof that decent font scaling can be done.  (Yah, I know all about the dithering they're doing to make it work.)

So, my question is this: Does Windows XP do any better at this than Windows 2000?  (This includes scaling ALL the characters floating around, not just some of them.)  Do more recent versions of Office than 2000 do any better, so that I can perhaps have Word doing a better job of scaling of Ariel?  Is Windows Vista supposed to have any major improvements in this area?

Alternatively, I have seen mention that some video controller cards are supposed to be really good at text, presumably because of some dithering techology.  Does this actually work very well, and does it work for everything that's displayed, or is it just stuff that uses a particular API?

Thanks!

[Preacherman]

I have middle-aged eyes, and I got an excellent suggestion from my optician.  He said to take off 0.5 of a strength from my normal reading glasses, and use them for the computer.  Since I use 1.75x readers, I bought a pair of 1.25x readers, and they work like a charm!  I can now use the smallest text I like, and it's still clear on the computer screen.  Very worthwhile remedy (and cheap, too!).

[Azrael256]

Better? Yes.  Good? No.

Vista is a major improvement with its nifty new fonts.  Most other things about Vista are... lacking.

Adobe decided many years ago to cater to the typeset-minded people.  Microsoft decided that they just didn't care about how anything looked on a page, and in doing so forgot how to make a font look good on a screen, too.  Microsoft's fonts are all just bitmaps.  Seriously.  Scale them up, italicise, bold, whatever, it just manipulates the same set of ugly bitmaps.  You can imagine what kind of mess that creates.

Btw, arial is a font, commissioned by Microsoft, to not infringe on the intellectual property of anybody else.  Seriously.

[m1911owner]

Preacherman, that's a danged good idea!  Though, in my case, it's slightly more involved since I already have about a -5.00 going because of nearsightedness.  Still, a pair of computer glasses makes a lot of sense, because that's where I earn my living.

Azrael, yah, I did already know about Helvetica-Redmond.  So XP is a bit better than 2000 in this area, but Vista is quite a bit better?

[Azrael256]

Vista includes... uhhh... I think six new groovy ClearType fonts (with real scalability) and a UI that is supposed to be pretty spectacular.  The big downside to it is that the new UI is supposed to be a true 3D rendered affair, so it takes some video card hoss to run it.  All of this is, however, somewhat speculative since the release candidates and the final product are almost never the same.

XP does a better job of ensuring that everything scales up decently, and does actually install a different set of fonts when you scale up.  The thing is that it installs a larger set of its standard fonts.  It's still an interplay of resolution and font size to make it readable to the "older" eye.  Oh, and any jump above 120dpi (a 25% increase from default) is iffy.

But, y'know what, cry me a river.  My vision was 20/13 when I graduated high school, 20/10 my sophomore year, and it's 20/8 now.  Everybody thinks being farsighted is cool.  Reading from a textbook across the room is a neat parlor trick, but there ain't a desk deep enough to put a screen far enough away for my eyes to see it right, and I'm a whopping 24.  My natural focal length will be something on the order of "here to the moon" by the time I'm 50.  I may have to build a dome around my head and rent my retinas out to astronomy grad students.  I have my mother to thank for that.  Luckily, I didn't get her astigmatism.