Text Size Affecting Menu

jbull · Post by **jbull** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 9:09 am

Hey,

I don't know if there is a simple resolution to this problem, but its been bothering me for a while. When users have their "text size" set to anything besides normal (in either Mozilla or IE) it affects the size of the text in the menu which in turns screws up spacing etc. Is there any way to have the menu text size not be affected by the users selection for text size?

Hope that's clear...

Thanks,

Justin

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 1:41 pm

Only by setting a fixed size like 12px or percentage and a stable font.

A font like Verdana is generally larger, but smaller on some computers.

I tried looking for a comparison chart but couldn't find it in my bookmarks, try searching for a font size chart to get a better idea of how certain fonts and sizes behave in different browsers.

What also might be happening is that the font is not available and the next nearest one is being selected. So you want one font or more that is generally available on most computers and is fairly stable in different browsers.

There is no easy solution, but if you know that its changing the font because its not available, try adding a font that is close in size to the list of fonts to use.

maz

Post by **Ruth** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 2:36 pm

If you declare a pixel for font-size then ie seems to keep it, but netscape and firebird will always change it if the browser text feature is adjusted. I even tried putting a style sheet which listed everything under the sun I could think of, like body, div, blockquote, td, tr, form, li and so on with font-size: 14px ! important; and netscape still down or up sized the font size.

Ruth

Post by **John** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 7:00 pm

Figures (Netscape), but the girls are correct. Setting a size (12px) should hold it. BTW, use px, not pt. It works much better cross-platform.

Post by **Ruth** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 7:32 pm

I'm wondering, John, if there could be some kind of javascript written to keep netscape from downsizing the text?

Ruth

jbull · Post by **jbull** » Fri Apr 02, 2004 8:29 pm

Yeppers...

Setting it as 12px keeps it the same size in IE...but no such luck in Mozilla. Guess there isn't anything to be done about it...

IE seems to respect set font sizes more than Mozilla. Fonts defined with CSS in IE stay the same size if the text size is changed. But css defined fonts in Mozilla change if the user changes font size. So again, I guess there isn't anything to be done about it..

But thanks for helping me out, at least the IE problems have been solved..

Justin

Post by **John** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 7:07 am

Ruth wrote:I'm wondering, John, if there could be some kind of javascript written to keep netscape from downsizing the text?

Not sure if a JS could get that much control over the browser. What you're talking about is pretty deep inside. Kevin will know.

Post by **Ruth** » Sun Apr 04, 2004 10:10 am

Probably it wouldn't now that I think about it after your comment. It's not the menu that needs control, it's the browser. I wasn't thinking clearly.

Ruth

75th Trombone · Post by **75th Trombone** » Sun May 23, 2004 5:48 am

Sorry to bump an ancient topic, but I stumbled across this and just wanted to say

Mozilla and Opera exhibit the correct behavior. You do NOT want to keep your users from resizing their text via the browser, and IE is evil for allowing authors to do so via CSS. Users may need to resize their text for a bunch of different reasons, notably to make it larger for the vision impaired.

The web's about being usable for everyone, guys. And while a certain degree of control is desirable, if you're draconian about such things, you anger more users than you endear yourself to.

You can and should, however, use ems (horizontal) and exs (vertical) for your measurements to keep proportions equal, even when resizing text.

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Sun May 23, 2004 7:37 am

Its okay to bring this thread up again.

The problem is that not every menu is going to work at any size, its a feat in engineering to make a menu work at any size in any layout.

maz

Post by **Ruth** » Sun May 23, 2004 11:57 am

Actually, the reader has the option of setting up style sheets with !important to meet their needs, even if an author uses that in their style sheets the cascading order gives the reader's ! important style rule precedence, so two things, since the reader can set ! important to get what they need, why should a browser override an author's creation rather than read it as it is, in effect IE does what the style rules state, unless I create a style sheet with !important on my font sizes, it will NOT override an author's just by setting my 'text size', second, if the browser is going to override the style sheet, why spend all that time creating it and designing the site? Let's just close down the w3c then we wouldn't have to read all that field specific jargon that provides so much to so few [relatively speaking] and makes so little sense to so many

Ruth