Or is there some other way to break out of the 640x400 or 480 limit, and have 8x16 characters on a 1024x768 screen?

This is video card/mode dependent. Why graphics mode? If a VESA text mode is available, use that.

see bios int 10 services

The highest density I can find is 132x 34 that still has more than the 8x8 pixel characters. And with only 8 high, the descenders used in g,j,p,q,& y touch the top of taller letters like b,d,f,h,l,&t and the upper case.

The obscurity of descenders makes text harder to read. I've seen sample lines posted in which the lellers were att scramteb ug, but if ascenders and decenders were all in the right place, it was still perfectly readable.

An ATI card will give me 132 (1056 pixels) wide by 34 (at 14 high) which is only 476, that is 1056x476, rather than the 768 in a graphics mode. If I could get the 768 height, I could render 54 lines vertically. and in two colums of say 65 char each with two between them, it'd have about the same text content as the facing pages of an open book.

My theory is that the facing pages have a standard amount of content that is in some way tied to short term memory, more easily organized and retained by the mind. I note that Chinese glyphs are organized in blocks of text that have similar height to width ratios with a similar number of words and/or ideas.

Text which flows all the way across this screen, like we see in so much html, needs to be in short paragraphs, or the eye, when it gets over to the left side of the screen begins reading the wrong line.

The server is screwed up right now at http://www.dc-pc.org cause none of the internal links work. but on the index.html page I show a screen cap of a text mode screen that tries to deal with some of these problems. One part in particular I'd like to learn about, is color control. In the text modes, you have control over *both* the foreground and the background color of each letter.

But- I remember years ago, in the BBS newsgroups, that some hosts offered ANSI color controls. Thus, my words would appear on my screen in say yellow, yours in say greeen, and another poster in red or whatever. We *never* saw people bitch because words written by another were attributed to them.

But in ANSI, you could also control the background of each letter. Thus by controlling both, say Red on black, blue, green, and then each other color on various backgrounds, it was possible to assign each poster in a given newsgroup a *unique* color. Just as we recognize voices by the timbre, so we got to recognizing certain color combinations, and it was easy to keep track of just who was saying what.

SO- if I can install my own ANZI font in a graphics screen, I can make it more readable, and control the colors, I can make text more clear. As I say at the website, we are not trying to save ink here. I thus make the ascenders much wider than normal; sometimes, at some resolutions, the browser makes the tall stem parts of letters so thin you cant see them. Sometimes as well, when compressing vertically, the descenders are cut off so that the lower case vowel "a" looks like a "g".

As higher screen resolutions become more common, we could render the letter shapes more precisely and consistently. and if you know *egzactly* how many lines the reader will see without scrolling, you can compose so that he dont havta be constantaly dragging the mouse around.

The systematic use of color avoids the necessity to use sequences of angle brackets which get added with every iteration of the thread, and result in lotsa short line stubs that break up the train of thot.