I noticed that if you slowly hover your cursor over the letters in ms-word, it creates a rainbow like colors at the intersecting point between cursor and the letter. It works best on letters with diagonal lines like ‘W’ or ‘V’. Why does this happen?
In: Technology
Probnalt something to do with how the monitor handles the way each pixel handles the image being displayed.
Assuming your cursor is white and the background is white, the cursor border over the text is probably bit much for each pixel to display the colours correctly, so there’s some bleed between what each pixel is doing.
Someone will probably have a better explanation
If you look closer you can see LEDs. If you look closer you can see transistors. If you look closer… But that’s not what it was designed to do. It’s meant to ‘look good at ‘x’ distance.’ There are higher quality screens that as the price goes up will show less and less ‘odd effects’ if you want to think of it that way, but again these micro-visuals are a side effect of design not what it was built to do. What you’re seeing are decades worth of engineering compromises that end up with what we have today. Every manufacturer has different designs and manufacturing processes that may make a screen behave differently under certain conditions of ambient light and what’s on the screen.
The adult answer is [subpixel rendering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering).
The ELI5 version is: Your monitor isn’t really a grid of small dots that can display any color. It’s actually a grid of even smaller alternating red, green, and blue dots that combine to form all the colors because your eyes can’t tell them apart. Usually the computer just pretends that the nearby red, green, and blue dots are all in exactly the same location on the screen. But for letters, sometimes the computer purposely uses the spatial layout of the red, green, and blue dots to make things even smoother, since the subpixel dots are so small. It usually works well and can be designed especially so your eyes perceive the extra smoothness but barely notice the colorful edges. But if the computer then draws another very thin thing (like a text cursor) on top of those kinds of letters, it can ruin the illusion and make the colors obvious. That’s what’s happening to you.
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