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Stop Using Small Font Sizes

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Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#41

Post by luser001 »

mortehu wrote: post #34
luser001 wrote: post #30

Hear, hear! :) I'm really happy to see this get to the front page. But why pixels (px) and not points (pt)? I made a site using 12pt text and it looks good everywhere (ipad, iphone, chromebook, linux, windows, mac). I suspect 16px is going to look too small on a Retina Macbook (I don't own one, so I wouldn't know).

From the CSS specification: px: pixel units — 1px is equal to 0.75pt. [...] The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. For a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm's length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch). http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2…

Thanks! I didn't know that a CSS px wasn't the same as a screen pixel.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#42

Post by srathi »

georgemcbay wrote: post #3

I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser. What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible. I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words…

One workaround: Use 'zap colors' bookmarklet found at https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html. I got this link from some other HN comments.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#43

Post by bradwestness »

pmb wrote: post #22
bradwestness wrote: post #10

12pt Times New Roman is the standard for publishing, so that's become the go-to size for a lot of websites. It was plenty big on 800x600 displays, but I agree that it's generally too small for today's resolutions. However, the solution isn't to pick a new, slightly larger point size and just set everything to that, it's to use media queries to set an appropriate size for whatever medium the content is being displayed…

1pt is a unit of length. One point is 1/72 of an inch. It should be the same height now that it ever was, even on old monitors.

Yeah using pt works too. The problem is that everyone uses 12px in their CSS rather than 12pt.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#44

Post by keeperofdakeys »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #9
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #7

We just went through this like a week or two ago. Yeesh. Every browser I use has support for text resizing, default text sizes, or zoom levels. Android WebKit has double-tap and reflow. I don't see why this is a problem demanding such rants. Ironically the first thing I did when the page loaded was tap Ctrl+- Ctrl+-.

The browsers I use most -- Safari on iPhone and iPad -- do not allow this. The only way to increase font size is to zoom the entire page, which often results in lines that are too wide for the screen. And a growing number of websites take deliberate steps to prevent any zooming on the page. I can't understand why any designer thinks this is helpful. At least iOS Safari has "reader" mode now, which does what I wish mo…

There is/was a bug pre iOS 6 where if you set a custom zoom level, some content may be chopped off when you change orientation. Naturally people wanted to stop this happening, so they disabled zooming. Unfortunately this effected every mobile platform.

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#45

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #32
georgemcbay wrote: post #3

I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser. What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible. I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words…

Idea: a browser feature (plugin) just like zoom, only that would up the contrast on sites (or decrease, too). It would have to be semi-intelligent to adjust the brightness accordingly (so it would work both on light-gray-on-white sites and dark-gray-on-black sites), but having an in-browser contrast control would be great .

[deleted]

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#46

Post by ANTSANTS »

simcop2387 wrote: post #37

This is one of the reasons that I can't leave firefox. It's got a really nice feature in the Advanced fonts & colors configuration that lets you set a minimum font size. These days I keep it set to 12pt so that sites can't start putting 2-3pt fonts on there.

Chromium has this feature as well.

I do miss Firefox's ability to set a different font for pages written in different languages though, if only for viewing silly SJIS art...

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#47

Post by epinull »

crazygringo wrote: post #32
georgemcbay wrote: post #3

I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser. What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible. I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words…

Idea: a browser feature (plugin) just like zoom, only that would up the contrast on sites (or decrease, too). It would have to be semi-intelligent to adjust the brightness accordingly (so it would work both on light-gray-on-white sites and dark-gray-on-black sites), but having an in-browser contrast control would be great .

There's a Chrome extension that does something like that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcf...

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#48

Post by Turing_Machine »

georgemcbay wrote: post #3

I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser. What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible. I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words…

+1. Previously on HN: http://contrastrebellion.com/

Re: Stop Using Small Font Sizes

#50

Post by nathos »

pidg wrote: post #21
crazygringo wrote: post #16

On the other hand, don't use font sizes that are too big (I've noticed that on a number of blogs and startup sites recently). It might look great on your large iMac screen, but when I read it with an 11" MBA, it's pretty frustrating to only be able to see a handful of lines of text at the same time. Even this blog which is doing the complaining, I wish I could see more of the text at the same time. Though it's a matt…

Agreed about line height - I usually go for 1.3em. 1.5 looks disjointed to me, feeling almost like each line is its own sentence or bullet point.

It depends on the font and the font size. 16pt Georgia looks great at 1.5em line-height, but 16pt Helvetica looks better at 1.3em.
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