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JohnF
Location: Palmy
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 Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 9:26 am Restrict the number of characters per line |
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Can I request that the number of characters per line be restricted?
Possibly by altering the CSS to make to make the page width fixed or
reduce the dynamic range?
I find some posts hard to read because an entire paragraph can fit on one
line. This requires an inconvienent amount amount of rotating the head.
Resulting in increased difficulty in tracking back to the start of the next
line. I suggest that ideally it is the eyes that should move, not the head
when reading.
I beileve this is because a variable width theme has been used on this site.
It looks fine on older monitors that are 800x600 or even 1024x768. But
not on my super-duper widescreen fantastic. Tap Ctrl + or Ctrl - several
times to zoom in or out and see how it looks at different sizes.
Contrast
| Quote: | | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. |
with
| Quote: | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod
tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim
veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea
commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate
velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat
cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est
laborum. |
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Angel
Site Admin
Location: Wellington
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| Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2011 3:22 pm |
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You could just resize the browser window you are viewing GD in.
The variable width works well as it scales to the window you are working in, no matter what screen size - whether Iphone, or tablet, netbook, notebook, desktop, or if you are using your 55" tv as a monitor.
_________________
Recognise anyone? Flame Warriors |
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JohnF
Location: Palmy
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| Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 9:55 am Examples of poor rendering and suggestions for fixing |
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Hi Angel
| Angel wrote: | | You could just resize the browser window you are viewing GD in. |
This places the burden of viewablity on the person browsing. I suggest
that this burden be removed through good design.
| Angel wrote: | | The variable width works well as it scales to the window you are working in, no matter what screen size - whether Iphone, or tablet, netbook, notebook, desktop, or if you are using your 55" tv as a monitor. |
It works - poorly. Because...
...on a large screen with a fully opened window the font is too small. The
text extends too far horizontally. See screenie below:-
...on my cellphone (Samsung Galaxy 551 400x240 pixels) it is too small,
the text is difficult to read due lack of resolution, the header takes up half
the screen. Zooming in on a page impedes navigation, and the level of
zoom isn't retained between page changes. See screenie below:-
I suspect it would take a significant amount of time to make this website
cellphone friendly. But surely the body width can be restricted to prevent
excessively long lines?
If it were practical to make a mobile friendly version of the site. May I
suggest reducing the header to a single line, removing the left side bar
and placing the authors name inline with the post title. See mockup below:-
Regards,
John |
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NigelT
Site Admin
Location: Wellington
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| Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 3:11 pm Re: Examples of poor rendering and suggestions for fixing |
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| JohnF wrote: | This places the burden of viewablity on the person browsing. I suggest
that this burden be removed through good design. |
Actually the accepted current wisdom when it comes to good screen design is to allow the text width to flow flexibly to support the browser size being used. Restricting it to a fixed width works for just one small subset of users and falls short for everyone else.
| JohnF wrote: |
...on my cellphone (Samsung Galaxy 551 400x240 pixels) it is too small,
the text is difficult to read due lack of resolution, the header takes up half
the screen. Zooming in on a page impedes navigation, and the level of
zoom isn't retained between page changes. |
No offense, but if your phone won't retain the same level of zoom between pages, that's an issue with you phone, not the GD website. Secondly, if we fixed the width of the text on the site, it would be a lot wider than your phone would support without zooming or scrolling, making it quite a bit worse, even without headers and left-side graphics.
At the risk of going too geek - HTML 5 and CSS 3 will introduce some of the necessary mechanisms to allow us to easily scale and layout the site differently for different browsers. However, both of these are still in development and most browsers used by our members don't support them in any form. So, this leaves us with the option of hacking PhpBB to force it to use a different template depending on which user agent and resolution is being used, which is a massive amount of work and not going to happen.
I'm sorry that you feel it's too difficult to resize your browser window in order to read the words on this site, but the 3 seconds it takes to do so will easily offset the perhaps weeks of solid development work it'll take to make the site behave more along the lines of what you're asking for. If you're desperate not to resize the window - how about holding down CTRL and using the mouse wheel to make the text bigger since your screen is huge anyway - just sit further back. If Kerry can cope with a 55" monitor, then I think perhaps most everyone else can manage as well.
Again, sorry, that's probably not the answer you were looking for. But the response on this one is quite definitely: No. Too hard. |
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JohnF
Location: Palmy
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| Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 3:22 pm |
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Just trying my luck  |
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JohnF
Location: Palmy
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| Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 3:30 pm Side note |
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| Found the settings to retain zoom on my phone. |
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