PlaneShift

Support => Forum and Website Discussions => Topic started by: Pakarro on March 19, 2014, 10:35:23 am

Title: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Pakarro on March 19, 2014, 10:35:23 am
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... :(

Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Choppa on March 20, 2014, 01:44:10 am
No.
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Rigwyn on March 20, 2014, 01:56:51 am
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?


Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Pakarro on March 20, 2014, 09:09:23 am
No.
Pity :(
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Pakarro on March 20, 2014, 09:16:52 am
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... :)
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Bonifarzia on March 20, 2014, 10:25:29 am
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 ;)
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Rigwyn on March 20, 2014, 10:34:57 am
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....   ;D

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Lynx-wikipedia.png)

Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Pakarro on March 20, 2014, 11:08:00 am
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!
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: LigH on March 20, 2014, 11:19:09 am
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".
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Peacer on March 20, 2014, 04:08:17 pm
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
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Gilrond on March 20, 2014, 06:41:30 pm
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/
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Peacer on March 20, 2014, 07:35:03 pm
is it something like this you want? http://i.imgur.com/C8zxsQM.png you can see rigwyns post being reduced :)
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Pakarro on March 21, 2014, 09:20:53 am
is it something like this you want? http://i.imgur.com/C8zxsQM.png you can see rigwyns post being reduced :)

Yes!  :thumbup:

Is it easily achieved?

Thank you for caring, and
Have a nice day!
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Peacer on March 21, 2014, 09:55:54 am
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
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: Pakarro on March 21, 2014, 10:55:53 am
Thank you! Will test it :)
Title: Re: rp texts almost unreadable due to extremely bad web typography
Post by: bilbous on March 21, 2014, 02:47:21 pm
Apparently themes have been disabled. It used to be you could change themes to any that were available on the website but now they have to be offered through the admin panel and none seem to be.