Font size prefs
Henri Sivonen
However, Western European, Central European, Baltic and Turkish are only
different flavors of Latin. On Mac OS X and Windows, one font can
provide glyph for all of them. Also, the charasteristics of Cyrillic and
Greek scripts are similar to those of the Latin script.
Does it really make sense to require the user to provide different font
size and font prefs for all of these on Windows and Mac OS X *by
default*? (On some Unix platforms that lack good support for outline
fonts it might indeed be necessary to tweak the size settings carefully.)
Wouldn't it be more user-friendly, if the *default* behavior was that
the font size pref affected all scripts at once? (Setting the size per
encoding seems like a feature that is only needed if there are some
font-specific problems.)
It's not too far-fetched to think that in the Baltic region a user might
be reading pages served using the Baltic, Western European, Cyrillic and
Central European encodings. Why should the user have to set the
preferred font size four times? (Plus a fifth time for Unicode--just in
case.)
--
Henri Sivonen
hen...@clinet.fi
http://www.clinet.fi/~henris/
Katsuhiko Momoi
>Mozilla has a different font size pref for each encoding.
>
>However, Western European, Central European, Baltic and Turkish are only
>different flavors of Latin. On Mac OS X and Windows, one font can
>provide glyph for all of them. Also, the charasteristics of Cyrillic and
>Greek scripts are similar to those of the Latin script.
>
>Does it really make sense to require the user to provide different font
>size and font prefs for all of these on Windows and Mac OS X *by
>default*? (On some Unix platforms that lack good support for outline
>fonts it might indeed be necessary to tweak the size settings carefully.)
>
>Wouldn't it be more user-friendly, if the *default* behavior was that
>the font size pref affected all scripts at once? (Setting the size per
>encoding seems like a feature that is only needed if there are some
>font-specific problems.)
>
Not for all language scripts. For Latin and Cyrillic scripts, this may
not be bad but for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, it is not that simple.
For Japanese on Mac, we re-set the default size to 14px recently. See
this bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87871
>
>
>It's not too far-fetched to think that in the Baltic region a user might
>be reading pages served using the Baltic, Western European, Cyrillic and
>Central European encodings. Why should the user have to set the
>preferred font size four times? (Plus a fifth time for Unicode--just in
>case.)
>
I had thought that if the user did nothing, the default size is usually
16px for all language scripts except where we set the defaults to other
sizes. How would the current behavior be inconvenient?
- Kat
--
Katsuhiko Momoi <mo...@netscape.com>
Manager, Web Standards/embedding
Netscape Global Customization Team
Henri Sivonen
<mo...@netscape.com> wrote:
> I had thought that if the user did nothing, the default size is usually
> 16px for all language scripts except where we set the defaults to other
> sizes. How would the current behavior be inconvenient?
If you want to set the font size to eg. 14px or 18px, you have to first
discover that the size pref is different for different encodings and
then change the size for each encoding separately.
Katsuhiko Momoi
>In article <3B8150A9...@netscape.com>, Katsuhiko Momoi
><mo...@netscape.com> wrote:
>
>>I had thought that if the user did nothing, the default size is usually
>>16px for all language scripts except where we set the defaults to other
>>sizes. How would the current behavior be inconvenient?
>>
>
>If you want to set the font size to eg. 14px or 18px, you have to first
>discover that the size pref is different for different encodings and
>then change the size for each encoding separately.
>
I think there are a few ways to keep the inconvenience to the minimum
level while keeping separate font sizes for all the scripts:
1. Select the default font sizes carefully for the scripts/langs so that
most users will be satisfied with it.
2. RFE: In case the user selects to change a default font, e.g. Arial,
for one encoding, present a dialog asking the user if the user wants to
re-set all the language settings for which the chosen font is the
default one. If the user says "yes", we can re-set all the langs/scripts
which have that font (e.g. Arial) as the default font.
- Kat
Matthew Thomas
>
> Mozilla has a different font size pref for each encoding.
>
> However, Western European, Central European, Baltic and Turkish are
> only different flavors of Latin. On Mac OS X and Windows, one font can
> provide glyph for all of them. Also, the charasteristics of Cyrillic
> and Greek scripts are similar to those of the Latin script.
I'm not sure what those thingummies are, exactly; they appear to be
encodings, but I don't know why they don't seem to correlate with the
encodings available from the submenu mess in the `View' menu.
> Does it really make sense to require the user to provide different
> font size and font prefs for all of these on Windows and Mac OS X *by
> default*? (On some Unix platforms that lack good support for outline
> fonts it might indeed be necessary to tweak the size settings
> carefully.)
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts (to name three) typically need to
be larger than Latin characters in order to achieve an equivalent level
of readability.
> Wouldn't it be more user-friendly, if the *default* behavior was that
> the font size pref affected all scripts at once? (Setting the size per
> encoding seems like a feature that is only needed if there are some
> font-specific problems.)
>...
With that in mind, my original spec for the panel had a checkbox inside
the groupbox:
+-Fon_ts for: [Baltic :^]-+
| [/] _Use default choices for this encoding |
| |
So you would be able to set fonts and sizes for `default choices', then
reuse those for all Latin scripts -- not only would you not have to set
the size multiple times, but you wouldn't have to set the typefaces
multiple times either.
However, we had quite enough grief improving the Fonts panel to its
current state <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28899> that
this feature had to be left behind. File a separate RFE on it, if you want.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing
<http://mozilla.org/>
Henri Sivonen
(Matthew Thomas) wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> >
> > Mozilla has a different font size pref for each encoding.
> >
> > However, Western European, Central European, Baltic and Turkish are
> > only different flavors of Latin. On Mac OS X and Windows, one font can
> > provide glyph for all of them. Also, the charasteristics of Cyrillic
> > and Greek scripts are similar to those of the Latin script.
>
> I'm not sure what those thingummies are, exactly; they appear to be
> encodings,
They are 8-bit encoding families or divisions of writing systems into
groups that have more or less similar character requirements,
geopolitical location and font availability within each group.
> but I don't know why they don't seem to correlate with the
> encodings available from the submenu mess in the `View' menu.
They do correlate with the encodings in the character set menu. You just
have to adapt to View menu political geography. :-)
* Greek is in the West European submenu.
* What I referred to as Western European is Western in the same submenu.
* Cyrillic, Baltic and Central European are in the East European submenu.
* Turkish is in the SW & SE Asian submenu (there is a bug about this)
> Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts (to name three) typically need to
> be larger than Latin characters in order to achieve an equivalent level
> of readability.
If there weren't font/system-specific issues, it would probably make
sense to have one pref for European bicameral scripts and another for
CJK. (I'm don't know enough about the requirements of Indic, Middle
Eastern etc. scripts.)
> With that in mind, my original spec for the panel had a checkbox inside
> the groupbox:
>
> +-Fon_ts for: [Baltic :^]-+
> | [/] _Use default choices for this encoding |
> | |
I think I like the checkbox approach better than the idea of a dialog
asking whether to apply settings to all scripts.