rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography

[Pakarro]

A little thing which is rather bothering in effect:
There is something called typography. And one of
the simplest rules of typography is to not have lines
longer than 60-65 characters. Violating this rule
makes a text very unpleasant to read and strongly
distracts attention.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens in the
often rather long texts describing rp situations.
Quite often, it is too tiresome to read the text
as a consequence of this violation.

As a (tiresome) workaround, one can make the browser
window smaller to reflow the text. But it would be nice
to have a text window, which is automatically limited
to 60 chars. Is this possible? I don't know about the forum software...

[Choppa]

No.

[Rigwyn]

Hmm.. if text was set to 80 cols with say a fixed with font, and someone tried to view it on a device with a width of less than 80 characters (ie. Mobile phone), the line wrapping would look really bad. Just curious, is this happening because of embedded pictures forcing the screen to be wider, or does your browser/device not wrap text?

[Pakarro]

No.

Pity

[Pakarro]

Hmm.. if text was set to 80 cols with say a fixed with font, and someone tried to view it on a device with a width of less than 80 characters (ie. Mobile phone), the line wrapping would look really bad. Just curious, is this happening because of embedded pictures forcing the screen to be wider, or does your browser/device not wrap text?

The basic idea was to set a maximum for the line width, to 65 chars _at_ _most_. Narrower space would re-wrap, and no fixed line width. I use wrap now to read these texts, making the window narrower to re-wrap to something readable, which firefox nicely does. But it is a nuisance to change the size of the browser window to read a web page.

The bad way to achieve some useful effect is to put in gazillions of paragraphs, because the wide distance between lines allows the eye to travel back to the beginning of the line more easily, causing less distraction....

PS. Are you an old FORTRAN programmer? That would go well with the 80 chars...

[Bonifarzia]

I don't see why resizing the window size is tiresome, if you can toggle to half a screen width using a key combination. Another thought: If long lines with narrow spacing are inconvenient to read, why not scale the text size (Ctrl+Plus or Ctrl+mousewheel for firefox, resetting with Ctrl+zero) until you get the desired layout?
PS: F77 programmer? Yes. Chars per line limit is one of the reasons why fixed format was so annoying to use

[Rigwyn]

I did (Fortran 77), but gladly forgot it when done. We have some folks at work who religiously stick to 80 cols even when coding in Java. ( Which is ugly when you have stupidly long camel case class names and variables. )

Maybe there's a firefox plugin for that?

That or just go with lynx....   

[Pakarro]

I see....

Resizing it must be

ad Lynx: I regularly use it when i forget to obtain the nvidia drivers before a kernel upgrade
And then, no X, and lynx to the rescue

Thank you all, and
Have fun!

[LigH]

Nerd solution: There are browsers (e.g. Opera) which allow to assign a CSS per website, which can (also partially) override the style of certain classes. Here it would be class "inner".

[Peacer]

or if you know how to use greasemonkey(firefox, for other browsers I can't remember the software use this) you can write a small script that reformats the window like you want

[Gilrond]

Firefox has a Stylish add-on as well, where you can assign any custom styles per site, per domain even for the browser itself:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/stylish/

[Peacer]

is it something like this you want? http://i.imgur.com/C8zxsQM.png you can see rigwyns post being reduced

[Pakarro]

is it something like this you want? http://i.imgur.com/C8zxsQM.png you can see rigwyns post being reduced

Yes! 

Is it easily achieved?

Thank you for caring, and
Have a nice day!

[Peacer]

yes, add this extension to firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
after isntalling and restarting firefox
in the menu go to functions->add-ons->user styles
click "write new style" or whatever the button is called in your language

copy paste this

Code: [Select]

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/) {
   
    .inner{
        width:30%;
    }
}you can change the number if you would like to make the width of a page smaller/bigger

[Pakarro]

Thank you! Will test it