Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
Hello *,
I have noticed this issue with IceWeasel on my Unibody MacBook a few weeks ago:
I thought that it was a misconfiguration, now I know it is ... expected.
It sounds very crazy as browsers are very common tools.
What I want to add is that with Safari everything looks fine:
so apparently there is way to do it for small screen.
Jerome
Felix Miata wrote:
On 2009/04/27 16:50 (GMT+0200) Klistvud composed:
Thanx 2 all 4 answering and clearing that out. Now I'm beginning to
understand a bit more! ;)
@ Felix Miata: yes, my DPI does differ from the "average"; as indicated
by your html pages (as well as by xdpyinfo|grep resol), my DPI is 129
(it's a laptop widescreen LCD).
Thanx also for refreshing my memory about the differences between px,
pt, em, % and what not. It's been a while since I've last looked at a
source code of a html page...
But, to be more practical: what do you guys do (short of hitting ctrl
+) in order to get a decent rendering of pages such as:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64307
or
http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/running-windows-smp-guests
On my laptop, those fonts appear extremely small:
Those are two sites designed by designers for designers, not for users. Those
sites' styles disregard user preferences entirely by sizing text (and
everything else) in px. No design account is taken of the preference settings
in users' browsers or DTEs. The designer assumption is that what he prefers
is good for everyone else. In most cases, the reality is much different, as
typical designers are young people with good eyesight and big computer
displays, hardly representative of average web users or laptop users.
The first thing you should do when encountering sites like those, if the site
is important to you, is to complain to the webmaster that his site styling
makes your web experience inferior. You can try pointing to a site like
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/web-fonts/ and/or
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size just in case all they did was copy from
someone else and don't really know what they did or understand why you are
complaining.
so far, my only way of permanently correcting this has been to increase the
"smallest font" in Iceweasel to around 14.
You've ignored the intended way. On the same preferences screen as the
"smallest font" are the preference sizes for proportional and monospace,
which are usually set to 16px and 12px or 13px. Because IW does not adjust
according to your desktop preferences or to DPI, when you run a high DPI,
these should be increased manually by you in proportion to the DPI increase
over 96. For 129 DPI, these would be 21.5 (22px) and 16.125 (16px) or 17.469
(17px).
Minimum is designed to be just that, the smallest permitted size, and is not
supposed to have any effect on your preference for basic size.
Is there a smarter/simpler way?
There is no really good way around designer imposition. Over 10 years ago
site designers were empowered to totally disregard user needs via the CSS
specs. Most seem to use every bit of that power to design for their own
tastes, and disregard user realities brought by increasing screen resolution
and decreasing eyesight that typically accompanies aging.
After a few years of this designer imposition on users a few defenses were
created, initially by the Mozilla and Opera developers, then adopted by others:
1-text zoom (later followed by full page zoom)
2-minimum font size
3-site style disabling
Note that even the just released IE8 still does not have minimum font size,
while even IE5 had a limited form of style disabling.
Remember, these are defense mechanisms, not true solutions, and they do have
their flaws. Other defenses installable via extension also exist. Using most
of these often causes text to get jumbled up on top of itself, or hidden from
view. Style disabling (look in the "view" menu) is most effective, but causes
rather bland results, and sometimes results in content being squeezed into
tiny iframes, where access is all but impossible without switching the
styling back on.
One other defense was provided along with the power originally given to the
designers. CSS does allow user stylesheets to override author styles.
Unfortunately, this counter-power is quite unwieldy, and requires the
knowledge and skill of a site designer to use effectively. The reason for
this is the great excess most designers use that more often than not requires
the user sheet to match rule for rule each and every designer font rule in
order to counter the designers font rule.
A most elementary exercise of the counter-power for users is a simple
stylesheet containing only the following:
body {font-size: medium !important}
This simple rule is a great help on many sites, but can be counter-productive
on some sites, causing the adjustment to swell beyond that desired. On many
of those where the swelling does not happen, most or all fonts will come out
the size actually set in your browser's
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
On 2009/04/27 16:50 (GMT+0200) Klistvud composed:
> Thanx 2 all 4 answering and clearing that out. Now I'm beginning to
> understand a bit more! ;)
> @ Felix Miata: yes, my DPI does differ from the "average"; as indicated
> by your html pages (as well as by xdpyinfo|grep resol), my DPI is 129
> (it's a laptop widescreen LCD).
> Thanx also for refreshing my memory about the differences between px,
> pt, em, % and what not. It's been a while since I've last looked at a
> source code of a html page...
> But, to be more practical: what do you guys do (short of hitting ctrl
> +) in order to get a decent rendering of pages such as:
> http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64307
> or
> http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/running-windows-smp-guests
> On my laptop, those fonts appear extremely small:
Those are two sites designed by designers for designers, not for users. Those
sites' styles disregard user preferences entirely by sizing text (and
everything else) in px. No design account is taken of the preference settings
in users' browsers or DTEs. The designer assumption is that what he prefers
is good for everyone else. In most cases, the reality is much different, as
typical designers are young people with good eyesight and big computer
displays, hardly representative of average web users or laptop users.
The first thing you should do when encountering sites like those, if the site
is important to you, is to complain to the webmaster that his site styling
makes your web experience inferior. You can try pointing to a site like
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/web-fonts/ and/or
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size just in case all they did was copy from
someone else and don't really know what they did or understand why you are
complaining.
> so far, my only way of permanently correcting this has been to increase the
> "smallest font" in Iceweasel to around 14.
You've ignored the intended way. On the same preferences screen as the
"smallest font" are the preference sizes for proportional and monospace,
which are usually set to 16px and 12px or 13px. Because IW does not adjust
according to your desktop preferences or to DPI, when you run a high DPI,
these should be increased manually by you in proportion to the DPI increase
over 96. For 129 DPI, these would be 21.5 (22px) and 16.125 (16px) or 17.469
(17px).
Minimum is designed to be just that, the smallest permitted size, and is not
supposed to have any effect on your preference for basic size.
> Is there a smarter/simpler way?
There is no really good way around designer imposition. Over 10 years ago
site designers were empowered to totally disregard user needs via the CSS
specs. Most seem to use every bit of that power to design for their own
tastes, and disregard user realities brought by increasing screen resolution
and decreasing eyesight that typically accompanies aging.
After a few years of this designer imposition on users a few defenses were
created, initially by the Mozilla and Opera developers, then adopted by others:
1-text zoom (later followed by full page zoom)
2-minimum font size
3-site style disabling
Note that even the just released IE8 still does not have minimum font size,
while even IE5 had a limited form of style disabling.
Remember, these are defense mechanisms, not true solutions, and they do have
their flaws. Other defenses installable via extension also exist. Using most
of these often causes text to get jumbled up on top of itself, or hidden from
view. Style disabling (look in the "view" menu) is most effective, but causes
rather bland results, and sometimes results in content being squeezed into
tiny iframes, where access is all but impossible without switching the
styling back on.
One other defense was provided along with the power originally given to the
designers. CSS does allow user stylesheets to override author styles.
Unfortunately, this counter-power is quite unwieldy, and requires the
knowledge and skill of a site designer to use effectively. The reason for
this is the great excess most designers use that more often than not requires
the user sheet to match rule for rule each and every designer font rule in
order to counter the designers font rule.
A most elementary exercise of the counter-power for users is a simple
stylesheet containing only the following:
body {font-size: medium !important}
This simple rule is a great help on many sites, but can be counter-productive
on some sites, causing the adjustment to swell beyond that desired. On many
of those where the swelling does not happen, most or all fonts will come out
the size actually set in your browser's preferences, the size(s) presumably
best suited to your personal tastes and/or needs.
The simple rule can be extended somewhat, but with greater likelihood of
overcompensation, approximately as follows:
body, #body, #content, td, th, li, p, dd, dt {font-size: medium
!important}
For Mozilla products, this rule must be placed in a
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
Klistvud wrote: > On my laptop, those fonts appear extremely small: so far, my only way > of permanently correcting this has been to increase the > "smallest font" in Iceweasel to around 14. Is there a smarter/simpler > way? You can try the nosquint firefox extension. "NoSquint allows you to adjust the default text zoom level, which is useful if you have a small display or run at a very high resolution. NoSquint also optionally remembers the zoom level per site." https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2592 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
Thanx 2 all 4 answering and clearing that out. Now I'm beginning to understand a bit more! ;) @ Felix Miata: yes, my DPI does differ from the "average"; as indicated by your html pages (as well as by xdpyinfo|grep resol), my DPI is 129 (it's a laptop widescreen LCD). Thanx also for refreshing my memory about the differences between px, pt, em, % and what not. It's been a while since I've last looked at a source code of a html page... But, to be more practical: what do you guys do (short of hitting ctrl +) in order to get a decent rendering of pages such as: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64307 or http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/running-windows-smp-guests ? On my laptop, those fonts appear extremely small: so far, my only way of permanently correcting this has been to increase the "smallest font" in Iceweasel to around 14. Is there a smarter/simpler way? TIA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
On 2009/04/27 13:48 (GMT+0200) Klistvud composed: > I bet all Iceweasel (or FireFox, for that matter) users have noticed > this. > Iceweasel/FireFox fonts are waaay smaller than your desktop fonts. For > example, if you limit the smallest font in Iceweasel to the size of > your menu/desktop/GUI fonts, it will actually be displayed as a tiny > font of about half their size. Vice versa, to get > web pages to display fonts visually equivalent to, say, your size-8 > menu font, you must set the smallest Iceweasel font to as > high as > 14! > I'd be really grateful if a person skilled in the art would explain > this to me. Why is a size-14 font in Iceweasel visually no bigger than > a size-8 font in the rest of the > GUI??? When did font sizes become a matter of... uhm, opinion? What is your display size? What is your display resolution? Is there a line in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that specifies DPI or DisplaySize? Do you use a display and cable that correctly support EDID and DDC? How do these pages look in IW, Midori, Epiphany, Konq and Opera? Not all the same? http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/dpi-screen-window.html http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-ptdemo.html In most apps, font sizes are set in pt, same as for printing. On web pages this is not the case (where authors typically specify sizes in px. em or %). This is also not the case for most Mozilla apps, where preference sizes are set in px instead of pt. Pt sizes are DPI dependent, while px size are not. As a consequence, in most Mozilla apps, the default needs to be changed by the user your desktop's DPI varies more than a little from 96, the default DPI assumed by M$ Windows and most web authors. Many things affect fonts. You've so far told us virtually nothing about any of them on your system. Font issues on Linux: http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-linux-about.html -- "He who works his land will have abundant food, but the one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty." Proverbs 28:19 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 13:48:24 +0200, Klistvud (quotati...@aliceadsl.fr) wrote: > Howdy, List! > > I bet all Iceweasel (or FireFox, for that matter) users have noticed > this. > > Iceweasel/FireFox fonts are waaay smaller than your desktop fonts. For > example, if you limit the smallest font in Iceweasel to the size of > your menu/desktop/GUI fonts, it will actually be displayed as a tiny > font of about half their size. Vice versa, to get > web pages to display fonts visually equivalent to, say, your size-8 > menu font, you must set the smallest Iceweasel font to as > high as > 14! > > I'd be really grateful if a person skilled in the art would explain > this to me. Why is a size-14 font in Iceweasel visually no bigger than > a size-8 font in the rest of the > GUI??? When did font sizes become a matter of... uhm, opinion? Is this a pixels versus points naming convention issue? As an experiment (all on one line) echo "12px test12pt test" > test.html and then open test.html with Iceweasel. -- Bob Cox. Stoke Gifford, near Bristol, UK. Please reply to the list only. Do NOT send copies directly to me. Debian on the NSLU2: http://bobcox.com/slug/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Klistvud wrote: > Howdy, List! > > I bet all Iceweasel (or FireFox, for that matter) users have noticed > this. > > Iceweasel/FireFox fonts are waaay smaller than your desktop fonts. For > example, if you limit the smallest font in Iceweasel to the size of > your menu/desktop/GUI fonts, it will actually be displayed as a tiny > font of about half their size. Vice versa, to get > web pages to display fonts visually equivalent to, say, your size-8 > menu font, you must set the smallest Iceweasel font to as > high as > 14! > > I'd be really grateful if a person skilled in the art would explain > this to me. Why is a size-14 font in Iceweasel visually no bigger than > a size-8 font in the rest of the > GUI??? When did font sizes become a matter of... uhm, opinion? what i might need to remind you is that almost all the web pages define the font size for each element inside the pages(except those badly made pages which forget to define the font size, then the font size you setup in browser will apply to it). > > TIA > > -- > Certifiable Loonix User 481801 > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org > > -- My platform is GNU/Linux Debian(sid-amd64, lenny-Intelx86) Gnome GTK. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Klistvud wrote: > Howdy, List! > > I bet all Iceweasel (or FireFox, for that matter) users have noticed > this. > > Iceweasel/FireFox fonts are waaay smaller than your desktop fonts. For > example, if you limit the smallest font in Iceweasel to the size of > your menu/desktop/GUI fonts, it will actually be displayed as a tiny > font of about half their size. Vice versa, to get > web pages to display fonts visually equivalent to, say, your size-8 > menu font, you must set the smallest Iceweasel font to as > high as > 14! > > I'd be really grateful if a person skilled in the art would explain > this to me. Why is a size-14 font in Iceweasel visually no bigger than > a size-8 font in the rest of the > GUI??? When did font sizes become a matter of... uhm, opinion? As a web developer, i think it's my duty to answer your question, so i made a experiment, and found that, the number you setup in firefox preference is in a unit called px, for example, i changed the font size to 10, then it means 10px, it's usual, for web pages often use px as the size unit, while the font size you setup in other places, for example in the system-preferences-appearence, the unit might be pt, pt is a bigger unit than px, so you got your question. it's also usual, for desktop applications usually use pt as size unit. I hope I'm right. :) > > TIA > > -- > Certifiable Loonix User 481801 > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org > > -- My platform is GNU/Linux Debian(sid-amd64, lenny-Intelx86) Gnome GTK. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
A Font Size is a Font Size is a Font Size ... not in Iceweasel it's not!
Howdy, List! I bet all Iceweasel (or FireFox, for that matter) users have noticed this. Iceweasel/FireFox fonts are waaay smaller than your desktop fonts. For example, if you limit the smallest font in Iceweasel to the size of your menu/desktop/GUI fonts, it will actually be displayed as a tiny font of about half their size. Vice versa, to get web pages to display fonts visually equivalent to, say, your size-8 menu font, you must set the smallest Iceweasel font to as high as 14! I'd be really grateful if a person skilled in the art would explain this to me. Why is a size-14 font in Iceweasel visually no bigger than a size-8 font in the rest of the GUI??? When did font sizes become a matter of... uhm, opinion? TIA -- Certifiable Loonix User 481801 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
