I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
You'd hardly want one the size of a city block, or even of a room wall.
I hated Shakespeare in high school. One of the big reasons was that I felt
that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.
Contrary to Internet opinion, Shakespeare probably never invented any words. At most he is the first person to record in writing a word whose written works have survived (mostly). Why would a commercial playwright (and Shakespeare wrote for money) use a word his audience didn't understand? They'd boo the play off the stage, with or without rotten fruit. He did both invent and reuse a lot of phrases: see <
https://inside.mines.edu/~jamcneil/levinquote.html>, or google for "you are quoting Shakespeare".
The
flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
the cadence of reading.
Pop-up translations would be much better, of course. I studied R&J with footnotes; my daughter, with an across-the-page translation into Contemporary Modern English. Of course, that meant I had to explain some of the gallows humor to her, like Mercutio's dying words: "Seek for me tomorrow, and you will find me a *grave* man."
While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that has to
be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental carriage-returns"
when text is too narrow and broken across several lines. Again, not studied as
far as I know.
Lispers, of course, have only one kind of bracket, and append as many close-brackets to each line as are needed there. (We don't count them, Emacs and vi do the matching.) Sure saves on vertical whitespace, which means you typically can see a whole function in one screen.
John Cowan
http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.orgIs a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa
good if I desire to see it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,
epical or dramatic? If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make
there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?
--Stephen Dedalus