RFC: change font sizes

[Stephan Kulow]

On Thursday 29 January 2004 12:28, Dirk Mueller wrote:
> > 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. 
Indeed, it seems the 13px I used for the screenshot were old settings, when
I remove all of .mozilla + .netscape, I get 16px - which happens to be exactly
12 points on my display.
> 
> > 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. 
Interestingly mozilla rounds point sizes while konqueror rounds pixel sizes
(looking at fontconfig debug output)

> 
> > The CSS1 spec suggests a factor of 1.5 
> 
> the CSS1 spec has a typo. They corrected it in a later version. 
Not exactly typo as I figure now :)
Anyway, css 2.1 seems to provide quite good suggestions (away
from strictly linear scaling):
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#propdef-font-size

We could add on top of that to go the next even pixel size if the
requested pixel size is if the resulting pixel size is more than 0.2
away from an integer (but I see no need for that actually - afaik you
have no way to find out which pixel size looks better with the given
font)

> 
> > 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.
hmm, isn't talking about points for non-scalable on screen a bit pointless?
you'll always end up with nearest available pixelsizes anyway.

> 
> > 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. 
Yes, I think that's a very reasonable thing to do. For the minimum font size
point sizes make sense, but for the medium font size, you have to compare
against image sizes very often.
> 
> 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. 
Hmm, I don't know what you did different, but for me heise.de shows a different
picture: http://ktown.kde.org/~coolo/fonts2.jpeg
Especially the right column (Top-Meldungen) is about unreadable with konqueror
while it got a reasonable size in IE.

> 
> 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 
Hmm, the larger the fonts get, the less blurry/ugly they get as less and less
obvious the hinting plays a role.

Greetings, Stephan

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