There is one thing that really pushes my buttons, one thing that is sure to send me off on a rant on life, the universe, and everything. I have a 21" widescreen 1680x1050 display - which might not be large to some of the real geeks in here, but to me, it's pretty huge. With so much screen real estate, why oh why do my friends all still insist on maximising every window they come across when they sit down behind my computer? This - and more - is the subject of the latest post on Microsoft's Engineering 7 weblog.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2006-02-05
I've actually commented on this before.
Part of the reason it looks like ass is the way linux does font rendering, and/or the default sans-serif font that is set on the system just doesn't scale down. Freetype tends to spaz on anything but the most basic of jobs.
The logic behind setting a font at 0.9em is sort of weird in the first place though. You are basically saying you are respecting that the user set a base font size, but you want to display your text at a smaller size then they want to read it at. If you want absolute sizes, you should be using px, which should look the same on all systems. em is for relative sizing. The only reason you should be going for lower then 1 is for something like a caption, or for copyright text, not for the main type size on the page.
Member since:2005-07-24
What is supposed to happen when you put a 'font-size: 81%" for body and then proceed to use a lot of 'font-size: 0.8em' for individual elements in the body? Are you supposed to end up with 0.8 * 12pt = 9.6pt or 0.81 * 0.8 * 12pt = 7.8pt?
And I thought this was obvious enough not to have to mention... but to the people who aren't getting 7 pt, what is your base font set to, and what is your minimum font size set to?
I'm not at all sure that this can be blamed on FreeType.
Member since:2005-09-14
Member since:2008-04-10
I'm using Liberation fonts for my defaults in most applications. Although the text is a little small on my screen, 17 inch 1280x1024, it's very legible. I have hinting turned on, and my default font size is 16. The default is so high because my slowly dying motherboard had me trapped at 800x600 or less for a few months, and everything was huge to me. Now, everything looks small if I put it on my usual 12 or 14. If not for Firefox's zoom feature, I'd have given up using Slashdot 
Member since:
2005-07-24
In Epiphany 2.24 and FF3, with the default font size set to 12pt, the actual font on that page is 7pt.
Update: Same thing with Epiphany-Webkit
Edited 2008-10-05 19:24 UTC