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Bug 53858 - Font size specification ignores users' preferences
Summary: Font size specification ignores users' preferences
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: obsolete
Classification: Unclassified
Component: collabnet (show other bugs)
Version: 4.x
Hardware: PC Linux
: P3 blocker (vote)
Assignee: jcatchpoole
URL:
Keywords: A11Y, UI, USABILITY
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-01-24 08:12 UTC by Marian Petras
Modified: 2009-11-08 02:34 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: DEFECT
Exception Reporter:


Attachments

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Description Marian Petras 2005-01-24 08:12:45 UTC
netbeans.org CSS files specify font size in
absolute numbers (height in pixels) and thus
ignores user's and operating system's preferences.
This is quite severe on systems with high
resolution displays.

For example, my LCD display has vertical
resolution 116.5 DPI (1050 pixels per 9.016"). The
default font size is set to 12 pixels. It means that:
- the tallest characters (like capital J)
  are 12 pixels tall ~ 0.103" ~ 2.6 mm
- most capital characters
  are 10 pixels tall ~ 0.086" ~ 2.2 mm
- most characters (non-capitals)
  are  7 pixels tall ~ 0.060" ~ 1.5 mm

To summarize, most characters are about 0.06" (1.5
mm) tall - this is certainly not an accessible
default setting.
Comment 1 Marian Petras 2005-01-24 08:16:08 UTC
I recommend that font sizes are defined relatively to the default font
size, e.g. "font-size: small" instead of "font-size: 10px". See
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/font/font-size.html for more
information on using relative font-size specification.
Comment 2 Marian Petras 2006-02-17 11:46:18 UTC
OK, I am here again. This time with a 125 DPI display. Most characters in
IssueZilla are about 1.4 mm (capital characters are bigger, about 2 mm). I think
this is no longer acceptable.

I do not think I am alone and I believe there are more and more people having
difficutly reading text on www.netbeans.org as many people here at Sun have
high-resolution notebooks and displays.
Comment 3 Jesse Glick 2006-02-17 14:48:58 UTC
Agreed. I have a 1400x1050 laptop display. My Firefox preferences have "Minimum
Font Size" set to 18, so nb.org pages such as

http://www.netbeans.org/kb/50/quickstart-webapps.html

look fine. If I turn off the minimum font size, however, the page becomes
unreadable.
Comment 4 Marian Petras 2006-05-03 07:48:30 UTC
A good place to start at:

    http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size
Comment 5 Marian Petras 2006-05-03 07:56:51 UTC
If you expect difficulties with making the change, I am ready to provide you a
corrected CSS file in minutes.

For a preview of how things change, start Firefox, install plugin Stylish
(https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2108/) and use the following "CSS patch" for
netbeans.org pages:

  @-moz-document domain(netbeans.org) {
    table { font-size: 100% ! important; font-size-adjust: .58 }
    h1 { font-size: 133% ! important }
    h2 { font-size: 117% ! important }
    h3 { font-size: 108% ! important }
    h4 { font-size: 100% ! important }
    blockquote.Note, p.Table-AltText { font-size: 83% ! important }
    li.Head2TOC, li.Head3TOC { font-size: 92% ! important }
    div#contentRight { font-size: 92% ! important; width: 25ex ! important }
    td, input, select, .articletitle, .articledate, .tasknav,
          .functbar, .functnbar2, .functbar3 { font-size: 100% ! important }
    .rarticletitle, .rarticletext { font-size: 91% ! important }
    .threelinesarticle { font-size: 100% ! important }
    #leftmenu { font-size: 91% ! important; width: 20ex ! important }
    #innav { font-size: 91% ! important }
    .va { font-size: x-small ! important }
    .searchinp { height: auto ! important; font-size: small ! important }
    input#loginID { height: auto ! important; font-size: x-small ! important }
    input#password { height: auto ! important; font-size: x-small ! important }
    .rtext { font-size: smaller ! important }
    #langmenu { font-size: x-small ! important }
  }

Then load any of netbeans.org pages.
Comment 6 Marian Petras 2006-11-06 15:51:26 UTC
The recent redesign of netbeans.org web pages has fixed this issue to a great
extent, thank you. It seems you actually no longer use absolute font size values
- great!

But although relative sizes are used, some important parts of web pages are
still very small - for example, all text fields, combo-boxes and other input
elements in IssueZilla have very small letters. I found that it is "as designed"
- line 694 of tigris.css defines (among others):

..., input, select, ... {
       ...
       font-size: x-small;
       ...
}

Why should be the most important part of a page (values entered into the form)
rendered with tiny letters? What is the reasoning?
Comment 7 Jesse Glick 2006-11-06 17:00:59 UTC
While there are no absolute font sizes, the basefont is requested to be smaller
than the user's configured basefont, which is just as bad IMHO. If I disable
Minimum Font Size in Firefox, everything is too small. The layout on the home
page uses pixel-based positioning which makes text actually overlap when using
M.F.S. but I was told this was a "feature".
Comment 8 jcatchpoole 2007-02-14 15:32:49 UTC
Talked to Marian, we found the x-small definition is in a SourceCast css file
(tigris.css).  Will investigate.
Comment 9 Marian Mirilovic 2009-11-08 02:34:12 UTC
We recently moved out from Collabnet's infrastructure