Re: eeeditor

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

J R FOX wrote:
> Yes, but do you need to scroll around constantly, in the course of doing your writing, because of
> the screen size ? I think that had been a primary objection, and -- at least for me -- it would
> become a drag fairly quickly. The characters you type need to have not only a requisite size and
> sharpness, but (in my opinion, anyway) you also need to be able to track wide enough lines at any
> given time for it to be appealing. Otherwise, it's fine just for memos. You know, I wouldn't want
> to write anything bigger than a haiku on my Brother labelmaker . . . .
Yes, scrolling left and rght is a royal pain. (And very bad Web
design, though few Webmasters seem to know it.)
But the screen shot Rafe posted on 1/13 seemed to fit the whole
page within the screen. And, despite its being gray on black, I
could read it.
Which suggests a real possibility for these netbooks: a workable
e-book reader. The existing ones (Sony's and the Amazon Kindle,
which one open-source guru calls the Swindle) have two major
problems: 1) Too small. Not just for type size, but for the
amount of text that can be read in one fell swoop. 2) Proprietary
formats, which leads to expense and the scholarly ethical issues
of DRM. But a netbook could read (in Xy or any decent plain-test
editor) the Project Guttenberg material and PDFs. Which is pretty
much everything one would want.
Three lbs. is not light, but the hardcover tome I'm reading right
now weighs that.

So the questions are
1. Can a netbook screen be rotated, so that it appears in
portrait, rather than landscape mode?
2. How about changing screen colors in Xy? It can be done in Xy4
under Windows, by making changes in settings.dfl. Does that work
in Linux too? And can you do it at all in Xy III (which I haven't
used since 4 came out)?
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx