Landscape vs Portrait Monitors
Laptop monitors keep getting wider and wider. What I would really like would be for them to get higher.
Why does my laptop come with a landscape screen that makes
me swear every time I read a two-column document?
What I really need is a portrait display that would make
the reading of portrait documents a pleasure.
Wide screens are useful for watching movies, because our field of vision has more width than height. On the other hand, wide screens are useless for reading documents, because typical documents are in a portrait orientation. There's a reason for this: our eyes have difficulty in retracing the beginning of a line when lines are too long. The same goes for program code: too many levels of indentation are difficult to follow, therefore the natural display style for code is also portrait.
Some tablet PCs can work in a portait orientation, but they're too flimsy for the use I'm putting my machine through. Also some display drivers allow the screen's rotation; mine doesn't. Maybe somebody will design a laptop with a potrait form factor. There's enough space on the width of this form factor for fitting a basic keyboard, one just has to rearrange the extra function keys.
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