RFC: change font sizes

[Dirk Mueller]

On Thursday 29 January 2004 10:41, Stephan Kulow wrote:

> We've got some bug reports lately about too small font sizes.

Lately is an understatement, we always get them each time something has 
changed. 

> So I'd like to gather some comments on the idea to shift our
> fontSizes[] a bit towards what IE got.

I fail to see the patch. 

> What you see is that our default fonts is pretty close to mozilla

Well, I don't see that on my machine. Mozilla seems to use 16px as default, 
which might or might not be 10pt or 12pt. 

> size=2 and size=3. And what's interesting too is that
> font-size: small is the same as "normal".

thats an artefact, it is certainly not true for every font. What most 
renderers do between 6px and 16px is that they skip the odd font sizes, since 
they usually look goofy. 

> The CSS1 spec suggests a factor of 1.5 

the CSS1 spec has a typo. They corrected it in a later version. 

> between medium, normal and small, 
> but while we've got 1.2 we're already way smaller than what IE got.

The main reason for this factor is that when you have 12pt as default and 
don't have smoothly scalable fonts, you must end up with 10pt for "small". 
11pt looks usually extremely broken. There is no easy way to change this 
factor, and mapping font-size: small; to 12pt will probably cause a lot of 
problems.

> So what I'd suggest: increase medium font size to 12

No. on high resolution displays, 12pt is huge. we'd have to switch to a pixel 
based default then. 

See

http://ktown.kde.org/~dirk/fontsize.png

we're actually bigger in "medium" than IE, otherwise we're pretty close to be 
the same. I don't see a reason for changing the font size calculation *yet* 
another time. 

I'm afraid that most people wouldn't like 12pt by default since it shows even 
more how blurry and ugly the fonts are rendered on X11. Unfortunately I 
didn't have time to fix SuSE's fontconfig on this machine yet (yes, I know 
the IE screenshot doesn't have antialiasing turned on, but it wouldn't make 
much difference compared to how extremely blurry the X11 fonts are). 


Dirk