Text lines are overlapping

[Jonathan Joseph]

I have a laptop with a very high pixel density (1920x1200) in a 15.5"
monitor. Therfore, in my web browser (Mozilla) I set the minimum and
default font sizes I want to see to be 24 pixels.

Unfortunately, in a large number of web pages, font-size and line-height
seem to be set in pixels. The mozilla settings override the font-size,
giving me nice large fonts, but not the line-height, resulting in the
nice large lines of text overlapping on my screen and being totally
unreadable.

Is this a result of poorly designed web pages that count on all viewers
using low pixel-density monitors or having very good eyesight? Is
this a result of poor design by the web page authors or a result of
poorly designed web-authoring software?

Is there any way to get a nicely readable web page in these cases other
than mozilla's View->Text Zoom option? I find that the text zoom
feature often produces uglier results than setting the font size (for
properly formmated pages). Also, I need to reset the text zoom for each
new browser window. There does not seem to be a way to make a default
setting for text zoom.

Thanks.

-Jonathan

[Lauri Raittila]

In article Jonathan Joseph wrote:

I have a laptop with a very high pixel density (1920x1200) in a 15.5"
monitor. Therfore, in my web browser (Mozilla) I set the minimum and
default font sizes I want to see to be 24 pixels.
Everybody lurking, see, here is someone with exact problem we have been
telling.
Unfortunately, in a large number of web pages, font-size and line-height
seem to be set in pixels. The mozilla settings override the font-size,
giving me nice large fonts, but not the line-height, resulting in the
nice large lines of text overlapping on my screen and being totally
unreadable.

Is this a result of poorly designed web pages that count on all viewers
using low pixel-density monitors or having very good eyesight?
Yes.
Is this a result of poor design by the web page authors or a result of
poorly designed web-authoring software?
Both.
Is there any way to get a nicely readable web page in these cases other
than mozilla's View->Text Zoom option?
User stylesheet(s)¹.
I find that the text zoom
feature often produces uglier results than setting the font size (for
properly formmated pages). Also, I need to reset the text zoom for each
new browser window. There does not seem to be a way to make a default
setting for text zoom.

I don't know about mozilla, but Opera has default for zoom. But Opera has
zoom all, instead zoom text. OTOH, that might be suitable with
highresolution, especially if 200% is good size.

There is some version of mozilla, that does some recalculation for pixels
based on dpi. It is windows version, I don't know more. But if you use
windows, I recommend you to find out if it would help you.

[1] Some starters:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~laurirai...ss/userstyles/
General userstylesheets are unfortunately least explained there, and my
example is trying to fit everything in 580px, so doing exactly opposite
you need.

--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>
Saapi lähettää meiliä, jos aihe ei liity ryhmään, tai on yksityinen
tjsp., mutta älä lähetä samaa viestiä meilitse ja ryhmään.

[Jonathan Joseph]

I Have the most recent version of mozilla (1.5) for running under
Windows XP, and it has a place to enter the monitor pixel density in
DPI, but unfortunately, setting this has no effect at all (probably
because the fonts in the offending web pages are defined in terms of
pixels).

Thanks.

-Jonathan

There is some version of mozilla, that does some recalculation for pixels
based on dpi. It is windows version, I don't know more. But if you use
windows, I recommend you to find out if it would help you.

[1] Some starters:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~laurirai...ss/userstyles/
General userstylesheets are unfortunately least explained there, and my
example is trying to fit everything in 580px, so doing exactly opposite
you need.

[Stan Brown]

In article <MP************************@news.cis.dfn.de> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Lauri Raittila
<la***@raittila.cjb.net> wrote:

I don't know about mozilla, but Opera has default for zoom.

Mozilla doesn't. It's a frequent request in the Mozilla groups.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Stan Brown]

In article <bo**********@news01.cit.cornell.edu> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Jonathan Joseph
<jj**@cornell.edu> wrote:

Is this a result of poorly designed web pages that count on all viewers
using low pixel-density monitors or having very good eyesight?
Yes.
Is
this a result of poor design by the web page authors or a result of
poorly designed web-authoring software?

It hardly matters. A worker is responsible for choosing appropriate
tools.

All you can do, as a practical matter, is create a user stylesheet
and pepper the declarations with !important. Of course you can
complain to the clueless Webmasters, but that's likely to be about
as effective as trying to push a rope.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Bertilo Wennergren]

Jonathan Joseph:

I have a laptop with a very high pixel density (1920x1200) in a 15.5"
monitor. Therfore, in my web browser (Mozilla) I set the minimum and
default font sizes I want to see to be 24 pixels. Unfortunately, in a large number of web pages, font-size and line-height
seem to be set in pixels. The mozilla settings override the font-size,
giving me nice large fonts, but not the line-height, resulting in the
nice large lines of text overlapping on my screen and being totally
unreadable.
[...]
Is there any way to get a nicely readable web page in these cases other
than mozilla's View->Text Zoom option?

I have this in my personal style sheet (in "chrome/userContent.css") in
Mozilla/Firebird:

* {
line-height: 1.2em !important;
}

That works well for me. I have minimum font sizes at 16 px.

--
Bertilo Wennergren <be******@gmx.net> <http://www.bertilow.com>

[Philipp Lenssen]

Jonathan Joseph wrote:

Unfortunately, in a large number of web pages, font-size and
line-height seem to be set in pixels. The mozilla settings override
the font-size, giving me nice large fonts, but not the line-height,
resulting in the nice large lines of text overlapping on my screen
and being totally unreadable.

I have the same problem in Internet Explorer, by the way. That's when I
want to read a longer text and override font-sizes. Some pages break
because of a fixed line-height (or so I suspect). Yes, it's a problem
of ugly design on the webauthor's part!

As a workaround, you might want to define your user-stylesheet, and
there use your own line-height along with the important keyword. Never
tried that, though.

[Eric Bohlman]

Jonathan Joseph <jj**@cornell.edu> wrote in
news:bo**********@news01.cit.cornell.edu:

I have a laptop with a very high pixel density (1920x1200) in a 15.5"
monitor. Therfore, in my web browser (Mozilla) I set the minimum and
default font sizes I want to see to be 24 pixels.

Unfortunately, in a large number of web pages, font-size and line-height
seem to be set in pixels. The mozilla settings override the font-size,
giving me nice large fonts, but not the line-height, resulting in the
nice large lines of text overlapping on my screen and being totally
unreadable.

Is this a result of poorly designed web pages that count on all viewers
using low pixel-density monitors or having very good eyesight? Is
this a result of poor design by the web page authors or a result of
poorly designed web-authoring software?

As others have told you, yes. The specific cause is usually that the
author tried to "optimize" the display in Verdana. The problem is that
Verdana is both objectively and subjectively larger than most other fonts
for a given point size, and therefore text that looks properly sized and
spaced in Verdana is likely to look too small and crowded in any other
font. There's a strong temptation for the author to specify a smaller-than
normal default font size and to pull in the line height, because the
defaults look lousy when Verdana is used. See
<http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html>.

[Jonathan Joseph]

I was (after I figured out the correct location) able to modify my user
style sheet to increase the line-height, leading to vastly improved
viewing of a majority of the "broken" web pages. Thanks all.

Is
this a result of poor design by the web page authors or a result of
poorly designed web-authoring software?

It hardly matters. A worker is responsible for choosing appropriate
tools.

I agree that to solve my particular immediate problem it does not matter
much, but the distinction could make a difference in the grander scheme
of things.

If the problem were predominantly the result of the implementation of a
widely used web authoring tool (or tools), with the actual web-content
authors being oblivious to the specifics of the generated HTML code,
then it seems that it would be much easier to affect a long-term change
by targeting the designers of the web-authoring software with
bug-reports or feature requests. If on the other hand, it's the
individual web-authors that need to be better informed, the prospects
are not as rosy.

-Jonathan

All you can do, as a practical matter, is create a user stylesheet
and pepper the declarations with !important. Of course you can
complain to the clueless Webmasters, but that's likely to be about
as effective as trying to push a rope.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Jonathan Joseph wrote:

then it seems that it would be much easier to affect a long-term change
by targeting the designers of the web-authoring software with
bug-reports or feature requests.

This is a real problem. The designers of web-page extruding software
are designing it to sell to the kind of people who buy web-page
extruding software. They aren't answerable to the folks who actually
have to make use of the resulting web pages, except in the most
indirect terms; and you can be sure that when the end users complain,
the web authors are going to tell them it's their own fault, they
should simply "upgrade" to IE and disable all its security features
for proper results. Wibble.

It simply wouldn't occur to them to blame the people who built the
web-page extruding software that they've bought.

Some of us around here have caught up with the idea of separation of
presentation and content (though not all of us, as a rather rude
personal email referring to one of my recent postings and telling me
how wonderful everything is with HTML3.2 reminds me). It's going to
take a while before the spirit of flexible designing (as opposed to
mere addition of the nuts and bolts of CSS, without the spirit!)
slowly works its way through into "mainstream" authoring software,
though, I'm afraid.

But it's getting there.