Huge fixed-width fonts on web mailing list archive

[Marc Fonvieille]

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