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gepepa · Sep 21, 2001, 09:16 PM

Just got back from a visit to my sis who has a 15" monitor (PC)....when she puts up a site on her monitor (Salon Magazine, for instance) the whole page is on her screen. I have a 17" monitor (mac) and I have to keep scrolling from side to side to read the contents...can I do anything to fit the contents to the screen size?

Patrick · Sep 21, 2001, 10:15 PM

Assuming your browser window is as big as it can get, it sounds like your monitor is set at a lower resolution than hers (resolution = the number of pixels on the screen). It looks like the Salon site was meant to be viewed at a resolution of 800x600 or higher. Look in the Monitors control panel (or Monitors and Sound, if you're using MacOS 8.x), and you should be able to set the resolution from there.

gepepa · Sep 23, 2001, 10:30 PM

thanks, Patrick...I did as you suggested, but that resulted in a reduced size picture leaving about 1.5 inch black area to the right and below, plus the setting went from thousands of colors to 256 and there was no provision for returning to 1000s. I guess I will have to scroll left and right forever.

HackManDan · Sep 23, 2001, 11:17 PM

You should probably set your display to 1024x768 or maybe higher depending on the quality of the monitor. You just have to adjust the monitor controls on the monitor itself to ajdust the vetical and horzontal size of the image, so the image fills the entire monitor.

Crazy ebot · Sep 24, 2001, 12:48 AM

Originally posted by gepepa:
thanks, Patrick...I did as you suggested, but that resulted in a reduced size picture leaving about 1.5 inch black area to the right and below, plus the setting went from thousands of colors to 256 and there was no provision for returning to 1000s. I guess I will have to scroll left and right forever.

Hmm ... my understanding is this: A Mac's default numbers of 'dots per inch' (dpi) is 72, whereas with a windows machine, it's 96.

I'd guess the problem was that at the same 'resolution' (eg 800x600), the windows equivalent will have slightly more screen real-estate.

'course I could be completely wrong ...

T.

SunSeeker · Sep 24, 2001, 01:18 AM

Yeah, but if the colours went to 256 with no provision to go higher it probably means he is on an older mac with low video specifications?
What are you running Gepepa

Hmm ... my understanding is this: A Mac's default numbers of 'dots per inch' (dpi) is 72, whereas with a windows machine, it's 96.

Out of the box maybe, but 1024x768 on a mac is the same as 1024x768 on a pc.

ae77 · Sep 24, 2001, 03:18 AM

Originally posted by gepepa:
plus the setting went from thousands of colors to 256 and there was no provision for returning to 1000s.

I think that's because you don't have enough VRAM.

gepepa · Sep 24, 2001, 09:00 AM

I appreciate the comments. I am using an old Performa 6400 boosted to a G3 by means of a Sonnet accelerator and have 88megs of ram. Please don't tell me to give it up...we are wed. The monitor is a fairly new Hitachi. I will go back in and try to expand the screen with the monitor controls. Thanks again.

Patrick · Sep 24, 2001, 08:57 PM

Originally posted by gepepa:
thanks, Patrick...I did as you suggested, but that resulted in a reduced size picture leaving about 1.5 inch black area to the right and below, plus the setting went from thousands of colors to 256 and there was no provision for returning to 1000s. I guess I will have to scroll left and right forever.

You may need to adjust the geometry settings when you set it to the higher resolution (usually buttons or knobs on the front of the monitor). These control the size and centering of the monitor picture, so you don't have to see any "black area" as you describe it.

Also, it sounds like there's not enough VRAM to support 1000s of colors at whatever the higher resolution is. So it's either high res with fewer colors or low res with more colors. I sometimes use a Performa 6290 with the exact same dilemma.

Sep 26, 2001, 01:46 PM

It is true that Macs and PCs have different default resolutions. This would not create problems when displaying web pages. Web pages are supposed to contain content but not formatting. It's up to the browser to display the content correctly for the viewing device.

That was the original plan. However most web page designers now use tables and other tweaks to make their pages look better. Unfortunately, most of them don't make the effort to test their work on anything other than the machine they happen to use--usually a PC.

So...blame the site developer for your scrolling problem.

gepepa · Oct 2, 2001, 08:45 PM

thanks to all. Seems more confusing. Some pages do fit my screen (Yale daily News, Mac forums, my home page...excite, etc.) so I will go with the last reply...at least I have someone to blame.

dr. zoidberg · Oct 3, 2001, 05:43 PM

this may sound stupid but couldn�t this be due to varying font sizes?

every browser has it�s own quirks with font sizes, so if the webpage doesn�t make proper use of style sheets things may look different on various browsers because of differing font sizes and resulting line breaks.

furthermore also browser-specific interpretations of formatting tags can add spaces and margins.

concerning graphics there shouldn�t be any differences however... if the page is coded properly

if you use iexplorer, try playing around with "text zoom".