Huge fixed-width fonts on web mailing list archive

Sat Nov 5 03:06:18 PST 2005

On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 03:45:41AM +0200, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
[...]
> > 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.
> 
> Then we need to find out why.  Increasing the size of *all* <pre>
> elements doesn't seem right.  The DOM inspector of Firefox shows that
> this particular element is:
> 
> HTML > BODY > #containerwrap > #container > #content > pre
> 
> There is no CSS rule applies to its font-size, so this means that on
> Windows the font-size of constant-width fonts is smaller than on other
> platforms *OR* that this is a side-effect of forcing font-size: 69% for
> all of <BODY>.
> 
> Can we please at least try removing the font-size:69% before the
> font-size of <pre> elements is increased?  I suspect that this 69% size
> of <BODY> affects what you see on Windows in a much more visible way
> than it does in X11.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't really like putting it back, but if you insist then it may be
> the only choise we have.
> 
> This is a catch-22.  If we put it back, then X11 browsers will show
> garbage.  If we don't put it back, Windows browsers will show garbage.

People can click on "Text Size: Large" at the top of the page to get a
"proper rendering" for the moment.  This is better than get back to
"crazy HUGE" font for non-windows/OS X users.

> There are perfectly good web pages that don't break because the browser
> happens to have a default point size of 12 pt, so either way (putting it
> back or not) we _really_ have to track down why it happens and fix the
> real bug and not the symptoms.

As I said in another mail, our doc/ uses a lot of <pre></pre> without
this issue (or at least with readable small fonts).

Marc