Wednesday, January 21, 2015

[fjocugxz] Trapezoidal scrollback

Start with scrolling text in the style of the Star Wars opening crawl perspectively disappearing to point.  The shape of the scroll is an isosceles triangle.  Shift the triangle to the left by an affine transformation turning it into a right triangle of the same height.  Chop the triangle in half horizontally, yielding a trapezoid and a smaller similar triangle.  Flip the triangle upside down and paste it to the side of the trapezoid, yielding a rectangle.

This fits an infinite number of lines of text into a rectangular window, suitable for a scrolling terminal.  Text gets smaller thus harder to read as it gets older, which is natural.  Very old text in the triangle is upside down, very inconvenient but still theoretically readable.

Possibly a useful application for very high pixel density displays.

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