Upgrading to phpBB3

[Z-Man]

Another small inconsistency: the 'post reply' button on PMs is the large version, while it should be small like the 'quote' button to the left of it.

/me likes the new threaded PM system.

[-=VcL.Rajinn]

I am not blind: Why is text so frickin huge!

[Paladin]

What do you mean? Resolution deals with quality. You're saying the page looks pixelized?

I apologize for not making myself clearer. When I spoke of resolution blow-up I meant the effect that occurs, or at least is seen as appearing to, when the resolution is dropped on a monitor. Things tend to suddenly increase in size, once again appear to, based on the drop in 'space'. Things just seem unnaturally large when I compare it to how it was even a few hours ago. The spacing, text size in specific areas ( quick guess would be .maintitle or some such), and the board width just all seem off to me. Perhaps the width simply seems off because off of other things. For example, when in the 'Post a Reply' page, the 'Subject' and 'Message body' on the left seem off in size. I could very well be 100% wrong. I like the skin colors and so forth, just figured I'd give the heads-up when it seemed off in areas.

[Luke-Jr]

What do you mean? Resolution deals with quality. You're saying the page looks pixelized?

I apologize for not making myself clearer. When I spoke of resolution blow-up I meant the effect that occurs, or at least is seen as appearing to, when the resolution is dropped on a monitor. Things tend to suddenly increase in size, once again appear to, based on the drop in 'space'.

Only if your DE is buggy, your monitor old and stupid, or the user foolish enough to override the real DPI with a fake one.

Things just seem unnaturally large when I compare it to how it was even a few hours ago. The spacing, text size in specific areas ( quick guess would be .maintitle or some such), and the board width just all seem off to me.

I deleted a few of the font-size CSS because everything was way too small. Then everything got bigger than it should have (?), so I nuked ALL the font-size settings. No idea why the heck everything is STILL larger than it should be.

[-=VcL.Rajinn]

who the hell taught you css?

[Lackadaisical]

I've found a lot of text on a lot of sites became smaller after I set my textsize setting to 11 instead of 16; google and wikipedia being the first that come to mind. I think it's definitely the 'right' thing to do, but it's been standard practice for a while to assume that 1em is set to 16px by default and that's why, when people started going from px to em everyone just took 80% percent of the default setting (because most people were used to ~12px fonts).

edit: also I kind of liked the softer text colors, maybe you should just have the black text in the posts? and keep the other text non black?

[DDMJ]

Ahhh!! Tank I told you not to inject the forums with steroids!


(click to enlarge)

You'll notice that my font settings on Safari are still at the default value =/

[Luke-Jr]

it's been standard practice for a while to assume that 1em is set to 16px by default and that's why, when people started going from px to em everyone just took 80% percent of the default setting (because most people were used to ~12px fonts).

What the heck? At least *my* "standard practise" is to write webpages using em from the start. There is no relation between px and em, and to invent one is just ridiculous...

[Lucifer]

No relation? em doesn't have definition until the font has been sized. Sizing it with pixels is the obvious way to size it on-screen, but sizing it with points is much better because then your font is the same physical size on every screen (supposedly).

I only use px for font sizes when I have to make something look right in IE, because that's the only browser that uses a different interpretation of points.

So, anyway, Lack is telling us that it's been standard practice to assume that your web browser, when it sees 1em and that's all it has to go on, is 16 pixels high. The problem with that assumption is that a) it may not actually be true, but is a good rule of thumb, and b) pixel-sized fonts will vary in actual size depending on screen resolution.

Point-sized fonts are supposed to be the same physical size no matter what, on-screen and on-paper, but sadly, are usually the same physical size only on paper. As far as I know, Mac OS X is the only desktop environment that implements point-sizing correctly for screen display, but pixel-sizing is still too unpredictable. POF: default x11 uses 70dpi. Windows, at least up to XP, used 90dpi, and you can change that in both setups. In either case, giving 16pt as a font size should result in a font that is the same physical height on all systems, and using dpi you should be able to easily convert point to pixel if you want. Only it doesn't work that way.... (I think IE used to quietly interpret pt as px because nobody in Microsoft could be bothered to work out the conversion)

So, anyway, em gets its definition only when the font is sized, because it is, by definition, the height of the font, including that little area below the line, iirc. Until the font has been sized, 1em is undefined. So my standard practice is to give a point size in the body tag, and then use percentages after that. Then use an ie-specific stylesheet to give a px size in the body tag. After that, I generally only give point sizes for items whose size shouldn't depend on the size given in the body tag, and also for items that are in situations where the percentage sizing breaks down (which frequently happens).

As far as I know, this is the way the w3c recommends to do it, or at least it's what they were recommending 5 years ago.

[-=VcL.Rajinn]

basically, in English, the font-size needs to be defined and not "nuked".

[Luke-Jr]

em doesn't have definition until the font has been sized. Sizing it with pixels is the obvious way to size it on-screen, but sizing it with points is much better because then your font is the same physical size on every screen (supposedly).

The font is/should be sized by the browser with the user's preferences. A webpage has no business telling me what size I can read-- it doesn't even know how far my eyes are from the screen (very relevant, TrollTech once discovered)!

As far as I know, Mac OS X is the only desktop environment that implements point-sizing correctly for screen display, but pixel-sizing is still too unpredictable. POF: default x11 uses 70dpi. Windows, at least up to XP, used 90dpi, and you can change that in both setups.

Actually, X11 will autodetect the correct DPI value from DPMI (monitor) information when available.

Anyhow, my point is that webpages should only ever scale the font where it makes sense, for example headings should be larger and subscripts smaller. I personally prefer to use percentages instead of em, but em could work just as well.

[wrtlprnft]

Looks great to me

What you're seeing IS your default font size. Blame your browser for having a ridicoulously high standard.

[Z-Man]

Was anything changed? I see no post body font size information in the .css, and my text is still too small. Increasing the minimal font size in the config only widens the line spaces and does not increase the actual font size. My suspicion would be that the font family makes a font to be selected that *can't* be increased in size any more, but I'm not aware of any such font on my system. Help? This is your regular Kubuntu with Konqueror.

[Tank Program]

edit: also I kind of liked the softer text colors, maybe you should just have the black text in the posts? and keep the other text non black?

The off color was bothering my eyes, unfortunately.

As for font size, yes, it has gone crazy in form elements. Everything else looks OK to me. If it's still too small, I guess it needs tweaking. *points to bzr*

[Z-Man]

I'd help with editing the CSS, but I still haven't figured out what the problem is in the first place. I tried adjusting all the screws I know about: The .XDefaults file (had a default font set there), xorg.conf for the DPI value, the KDE configuration and Konqueror's font settings. It's the same on my Laptop and my work PC. Nothing I do changes the actual size of the post body font, the only thing that changes is the line spacing. It's purely a Konqueror problem, Firefox changes the font size just fine, even if I allow the site to pick the fonts (which I usually don't).