A 24' monitor is indeed a little too big for a long eye exposure to text. Some people can take it without a problem. But these are usually young eyes. More tired eyes (or older) will have trouble with such monitors when doing concentration reading. Here's a few loose ideas (meaning some may not couple well with others): • Reduce empty space (which does fatigue the eyes) by setting at least a two-page view in your screen and increasing the pages zoom factor to occupy the most of your screen (without forcing you to scroll if that bothers you). • Invert contrast if available (it seems you have it). ![]() An application called f.lux, available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and iOS (which requires a jailbreak), has a goal of keeping your eyes healthy every time you're looking at your screen. While not available for Android, there are alternatives called Twilight and CF Lumen (the latter requiring root access ).
• Set your PDF Reader to Read mode (or Full Screen if unavailable). On most readers, this turns the background black and the white page in the center with a reasonable zoom factor that you may have or not the ability to change. Many people find this the least tiring method. • Get yourself a vertical monitor (or a rotatable one) between 19' and 21'. These screen sizes are the least damaging to your eyes, force less eye movement and are very friendly to a wider range of space between you and the monitor (a larger monitor forces you to place it further away). Vertical if you can, because you will be able to use higher zoom factors without forcing you to scroll within the same page. Some tips: • Sit at a comfortable distance from the screen. If you're too close then you'll be turning your head and/or eyes a lot. • Change the zoom level so that the words are a comfortable size for your eyes. • The brightness of the areas around your monitor should be the same as the average brightness on your monitor. All human eyes automatically do something called saccades where they flit around every once in a while to get extra contextual information for the brain. If, for example, you are in a dark room with a bright monitor, your iris will have to keep changing between more-closed (when looking at the monitor) and more-open (when flitting to the dark non-monitor background). This can cause fatigue, headaches, etc. • Depending on your eyes, the monitor, and your distance from the screen, you might consider the heretical choice of running the reader on Windows instead of OS X. Apple has the philosophy that all text should be positioned exactly as if it were printed, even if that means that it creates fuzziness when antialiased on a screen. Microsoft's philosophy is that a document should look good if viewed on a monitor and it's okay to shift font strokes by sub-pixel amounts to avoid blurriness. If you're a professional doing layout for a print process, the Mac is probably the better option. If you're just trying to read some text with little eye strain, there are those that would argue Microsoft got it right.
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