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MCG  January 2012

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Subject:

Re: text size vs zoom

From:

Eric Baird <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Museums Computer Group <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:12:47 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Parts/Attachments

text/plain (67 lines)

On 26/01/2012 09:02, Little, David wrote:
> Personally I'm looking forward to the days when poorly spaced 10pt Arial
> flowing on for eternity (Wikipedia and about a million other sites I'm
> looking at you) disappears forever. Web typography has come a long way in
> the last couple of years so there's a great deal of information out
> there[1] and you can use fonts beyond the standard selection using
> services like Typekit, Fontdeck (paid) or Google Web Fonts (free).
>
> [1] http://webtypography.net/ for instance.
>
> David
>
That page didn't look great when I viewed it, which was kinda odd, 
considering the subject matter. The serifs of the skinny white body text 
were "flaring" against the dark red background, and the result wasn't 
terribly nice. The font looked suspiciously like Times New Roman.

I tried it on recent versions of Firefox and Chrome under WinXP, and it 
looked the same ... it wasn't until I tried it on Explorer 8 that a 
different set of font settings kicked in and the thing finally looked 
tasteful (with heavier body-text and a different font), and I realised 
what the designer had been aiming for.

So I'm guessing that the page either assumes some sort of font system 
that's IE-specific, or has some other problem when viewed on other 
browsers, or requires Win7/OSX.

I'm guessing that it probably looks marvelous on a Mac, but this isn't a 
"Mac vs PC" thing, because Safari on my (2010) iPod Touch also doesn't 
show the intended font, and also does some odd things with relative font 
sizes in the title.

All these platforms also had the same problem in that the "/of/" and 
"/to the/" in the title were the same size as the rest of the text 
(bigger, on the iPod!), so that the inconsequential text ended up 
emphasised, and (due to the way that the slanted strokes draw) bolder 
than the rest of the title. This was also the behaviour with Firefox and 
Chromium running under Ubuntu Linux 10.10.
This confused me, because normally you'd only italicise those minor 
words if they were also smaller than the rest of the text, or 
de-emphasised in some other way.

On a Samsung Android 2.2 mini-tablet ... lo and behold, all was 
revealed, the correct fonts showed up ... /and/ the minor words were 
(appropriately) smaller than the rest of the title text, so it seems 
that the designer probably originally did a good job, it's just that 
their design wasn't being shown "as intended" on a range of platforms.

Oh, one last problem. Although the pages do look admittedly lovely and 
wonderful on the Android browser in portrait mode, when you rotate it 
into landscape mode, the landing page title text overlaps itself, giving 
a bit of a jumble.


If this website's typography has particular OS requirements, then (since 
it's a site /about/ website typography) I think that info should 
probably be on the landing page.

Eric

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