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Ask HN: Portrait vs. Landscape monitor setup.

5 points by dan_the_welder ↗ HN
I have been doing some web design and one of things that irks me is poor use of screen real estate especially on my wide screen monitor.

After about a week I found myself looking at the standard aspect ratio monitor at my workstation and flipped it on it's side and rotated the video for a ghetto portrait setup.

So far (about a week) I love it. Web pages look great, less vertical scrolling and very few pages require any side scrolling.

Anyone else using a portrait setup?

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 25.8 ms ] thread
ScottWhigham
Not I but I have seen folks who successfully use a mix of the two - their "main" being landscape and the monitor on the right or left (or both) being a portrait set up.
dan_the_welder
Right, that was my initial inspiration. I have a portrait tablet to my left I use for keeping documents and man pages off my main screen and I thought, "Why not both monitors portrait?"
mmt
Whenever I can, ever since I was spoiled by getting readable 80x60 on a "portrait" Ann Arbor Ambassador (which, being a hoarder, I still have) as a child.

Nowadays, though, it's more about vertical resolution rather than aspect ratio, so a 2560x1600 isn't worth the effort to rotate, Given the choice, however, I'd rather have two 1200x1920s instead, which provides more pixels and has been (even with a Matrox GXM to facilitate connection to a laptop) cheaper.

nailer
Perhaps the popularity of landscape screens come from television, where there is usually more to be seen horizontally than vertically.

Economies of scale would have made the CRTs cheap for use in computers, even though computers are usually used for documents rather than scenes.

adamtj
Unfortunately, turning a normal LCD on its side means you can't do sub-pixel anti-aliasing of fonts (at least in the horizontal direction, which is what you want.)
dan_the_welder
Why is that? Is the video card optimized for a particular orentiation or the LCD?
l0nwlf
Landscape - Movies, Surfing Portrait - Coding However I have 1 22'' monitor which I use parallely with my MBP as a landscape view. However if I could hack to to use portrait view, i would be more than happy. Any tips ?