Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 5 Nov 2005 11:59:46 +0100
From:      Marc Fonvieille <blackend@freebsd.org>
To:        Emily Boyd <soc-emily@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-www@freebsd.org, keramida@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Huge fixed-width fonts on web mailing list archive
Message-ID:  <20051105105946.GA600@gothic.blackend.org>
In-Reply-To: <436BFF8D.1050502@freebsd.org>
References:  <200511030125.jA31PLrJ023110@bright.research.att.com> <20051104103619.GB602@gothic.blackend.org> <20051104124921.01f8d98d@localhost> <436B80B4.6080107@freebsd.org> <20051104173806.GK602@gothic.blackend.org> <20051104232616.GB2289@flame.pc> <436BFF8D.1050502@freebsd.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 11:40:45AM +1100, Emily Boyd wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> >>For the moment I just commented out the font-size on
> >>global.css, this should please many persons.
> >
> >It does, if you ask me.  If anyone has sample screenshots that
> >clearly show why this size is too small, I'd be very interested
> >to see them, please.
> 
> Try Firefox (or any Mozilla-based browser) on Windows:
> 
> http://www.emilyboyd.com/design/freebsd/pre_firefox_win.png
> 
> Or Safari:
> 
> http://www.emilyboyd.com/design/freebsd/pre_safari_mac.png
> 
> As I said, it's now unreadable.

Well, it's difficult to compare systems that do not use the same default
size for fonts with their browsers (16px/96dpi under windows, 14px or
12px under Mac), etc.
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/font/ will explain
that with nice examples.

> 
> Until we can work out the proper fix, I would recommend putting it back
> to how it was; having larger (but perfectly readable) fonts in some
> browsers is far better than having tiny fonts in others.
> 

As I said in a previous mail, the problem is not new but was less
disturbing.  For example let's look at
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-start.html
this page is full of <pre></pre> (every console output uses
<pre></pre>).  If we look carefully to the CSS, we can see that there is
no font-size definition; so I tried many browsers (Firefox, IE under
windows, and Firefox/Mozilla under FreeBSD) and it was readable in all
cases (maybe Firefow under windows was displaying the smallest font but
it was different from the current <pre></pre> used in the new layout).

So I believe there is a problem with "font definition" in the new
layout.  From my point of view I'd prefer to keep the "current small"
scheme since it's possible for Firefox/Windows and Safari/OS X users to
click on "large font" to get a readable page; I mean people can get a
proper display without tweaking their font settings.
However, I think we have to investigate this font size issue to get the
same rendering as we currently have with the Handbook and such.

Marc



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20051105105946.GA600>