LAST EDITED ON Jan-29-18 AT 04:36 PM (EST)
 
I got tired of looking at Verdana all the time, so I changed it to Calibri. I'm not sure I like it, not because Verdana is better than Calibri, but because it makes the scaling kind of weird. I might change it back. We'll see.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I suspect it isn't the scaling, it's the font itself; Calibri is smaller and more compact than Verdana.

Hmm... I've got so many extra fonts on my system, I can't remember if it's one of the standards; what do you think of Trebuchet? A little bit more compact than Verdana, but unlike Calibri, it isn't smaller. Entirely IMHO, but I consider it a bit more readable than either of them, too.

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>I suspect it isn't the scaling, it's the font itself; Calibri is
>smaller and more compact than Verdana.

That shouldn't affect the vertical size, though, should it? I wouldn't have thought it would, since that's kind of how font sizes are calibrated. Then again, that's how it works in the real world; as I type it, it occurs to me that I don't actually know if that's true of HTML font scaling, since the settings for those are all arbitrary and at least partially browser-dependent. So perhaps my background in Actually Printed Things has led me astray once again.

How common is Trebuchet? Whatever it's set to needs to be something that is present on most user systems out there, since (unlike, for instance, the Adobe Typekit fonts embedded in the Gun of the Week pages by Dreamweaver) they are entirely client-side in this application. (That's why my first experiment used Calibri, which like Verdana is a stock Windows font, and is the default font in Microsoft Word, so presumably present on many Macs as well.) I mean, I could set it to Futura or Gill Sans, but I'm guessing that would only amuse, well, me. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oh, it allows for nested font face specs (probably just passes the information in that form field to a <font face=" "> tag), so I can set it up so it fails through to Calibri if Trebuchet isn't found, anyway. And then Verdana after that. Can't actually test that without deleting fonts off my system, of course, but it doesn't throw me any error messages, anyway.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Weird. Now I'm seeing the text in what I think is Times New Roman. Are you sure "font face" is the right tag? I have some old test HTML files with working fallback, where I used "font-family" with a separator in the font list of a comma and a space. It is an old file, though (from way back when I was learning HTML4), maybe "font-family" is deprecated these days?

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LAST EDITED ON Jan-27-18 AT 10:15 PM (EST)
 
>Weird. Now I'm seeing the text in what I think is Times New Roman. Are
>you sure "font face" is the right tag?

I don't know if that's really what the DCForum admin form is doing; it was just speculation on my part. It has a set of form fields you plug the names of fonts you want to appear into, and those fields are all named "(something) font face", so I suspect font face= is what it's slotting them into on the backend, but I don't really know. Keep in mind that DCF predates the complete ubiquity of CSS, and the deprecation of a half-million things that used to be done with flags inside HTML tags and are now customarily done with CSS, by a couple of thousand Internet Years, so if there's a Best Practice for doing that kind of thing, it is almost certainly not what DCF is doing.

Not sure why it would have gone to Times (that didn't happen for me); I didn't have the list of possible fonts comma-delimited, which might have caused it to do something that confused your browser and made it fall back to the default. I just went back and added commas to the list, basically just to see what would happen. If it does something really terrible, I'll just set it all back to Verdana and forget I messed around with it.

Apologies if this is really super-annoying anybody. One of the many shortcomings of DCF is that it hasn't got a sandbox, you have to make these changes live and just see what happens.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Looks like the comma-delimiting fixed it, the pages are coming out right now.

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>
>How common is Trebuchet?
>

I have Trebuchet MS on my machine, and I've never downloaded a font for it, so I'd go for "every Windows computer has it."

I can't get data for any other OS, though.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

For Debian-based Linux distributions, the package ttf-mscorefonts-installer installs a number of Microsoft-copyrighted fonts, including Trebuchet. I don't have any actual statistics, but at a guess, around two-thirds of all Debian-based installations will have it.

Core Fonts, that's the term I was trying to think of. There used to be a Microsoft page with news, updates and Truetype file downloads, but I lost track of it many years ago in a site reshuffle. I wasn't sure if Trebuchet was part of that set.

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>I changed it Calibri.

Oh. THATS what happened. I thought I had suddenly broke something

>>I changed it Calibri.
>
>Oh. THATS what happened. I thought I had suddenly broke something

Right? Glad it turned out to not be me (or something wrong, for that matter).

For what it's worth, I think I approve of our new font overlords. I'm not sure but I suspect my only reluctance is just because of my advancing decrepitude and baked-in resistance to change.

--sofaspud
--

LAST EDITED ON Jan-29-18 AT 05:57 PM (EST)
 
You're not alone. And lord, does it look broken to me. Oh, well, not my forum. But ick in my opinion.
Primarily because I was much pleased when the font INCREASED in the forum, my eyes not being any too happy with much of anything, and so when this shrink to, what I think is, smaller than before? Not happiness with me. I also, honestly, think it's an ugly font, for some undefinable reason.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>Primarily because I was much pleased when the font INCREASED in the
>forum, my eyes not being any too happy with much of anything, and so
>when this shrink to, what I think is, smaller than before?

It shrank when I went to Calibri, but adding Trebuchet to the list seemed to fix that for me. Anyway, I can try bumping it up, though beyond a certain point it breaks the Forum layout to increase the font size on the backend. If it hits that ceiling, you'd probably be better off zooming in with your client instead. We'll see what happens.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

OK, going up one size class across the board doesn't seem to have caused significant havoc (although it probably will make all of the posts with "font size=" tags in them look a little odd, since those settings aren't relative).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Looks good. <thumbs up>

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It may not have broken anything, but it looks absolutely huge in my browser.

Ditto on my tablet.

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

>It may not have broken anything, but it looks absolutely huge in my
>browser.

There's only so much tweaking to be done from the forum config side; eventually someone, either on the bigger-fonts or the smaller-fonts side, is going to have to do it with browser adjustments instead. I like the changed-up font and I lean toward erring bigger for accessibility purposes, but if you guys really, really hate it, I'll change it back to the way it was before I started (which was, FTR, with already-mildly-upscaled Verdana).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

You don't have to change it on my account. But just FYI, this is what it looks like on my screen:

https://imgur.com/a/DgRsy

(Click on the image to expand)

> I
>like the changed-up font and I lean toward erring bigger for
>accessibility purposes,

As an aging gamer/writer I DO totally love that assumption. For a while I'd been using the browser zoom function. As you said, though, at about the time you'd implemented this my old zoom started causing bad ww breaks and such.

But I don't need em with the new font & size combination.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-29-18 AT 09:28 PM (EST)
 
Oops, I just made a topic in the website board about this. I'll delete it right after I finish here.

On mobile, or at least my woefully out of date version of chrome on ipad, the topic and convergence links look the same except now they're ENORMOUS. I'm.....not a fan of this.

Edit to add my own pics:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/381517048401887253/407722326604382208/image.png=?

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/381517048401887253/407722334468833280/image.png=?

.....I forget how to make it a link without making it load inline. Remove the =? On your own I guess unless somebody comes along to fix that...

Oh, additional edit: it's the same on my much more up to date iPad, too. The topic Links are enormous.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-29-18 AT 09:47 PM (EST)
 
>On mobile, or at least my woefully out of date version of chrome on
>ipad, the topic and convergence links look the same except now they're
>ENORMOUS.

Well, that I can do a little bit about. Those sizes were set to one size bigger than everything else before, so when I incremented everything, they became size 5. Apparently on some browsers the font sizes don't scale evenly (i.e., 5 is bigger than 4 by a lot more than 4 is bigger than 3). So I've now set everything to 4 across the board.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's MUCH better.

Holy COW is it ever, thanks Gryph.

It looks like this for me.

Not sure how it ought to look at all, but I'm in nice exotic box right now...

How odd. That isn't any of the three fonts listed in the settings (which are all sans-serif).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It's because I set default font to Adobe Source something Pro. I think. On that machine. And, lacking the Microsoft ones, miracles happen.

This is on Windows 7.

In general, DCForum, CSS and general horror of fonts ensure that other people are not as likely to see the forum as you intent it them to see. T_T

Ok, something is rather peculiar here, because depending on where in the forum I am, the font looks different. This post, for instance, look different than Kendra's post in the "website" section. Now, I could understand if it looked different than it IS, as it were? That could be explained with cookies or cached or what-not. But different in different places of the same forum?

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>Ok, something is rather peculiar here, because depending on where in
>the forum I am, the font looks different. This post, for instance,
>look different than Kendra's post in the "website" section.

I think that has something to do with whether a topic has enough posts to go to threaded mode. I've noticed that if I open a threaded topic from before the change by clicking "View All", it opens in the old font, until and unless I click one of the individual posts; if I do that, then hit View All again, it reloads in the new one. I'm not certain why that is, but I suspect it probably has something to do with the semi-dynamic way DCForum generates the threaded vs. unthreaded topics.

tldr: dunno, probably more Backend Weirdness from our old friend DCF

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.