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Comment by vinceyuan | Hacker News Reader

The font size on this page is very small. My eyes hurt when I read it on my non-retina 13-inch Macbook Pro (on low-resolution external monitor, it looks bigger.). Is it because I am not a native English speaker? Do native English speakers get used to this font size?

Some websites including Hacker News use very small font size. Reddit's font size is bigger. I created a HN web reader ( http://hackernewsroom.com ) with bigger font size (for myself and friends) to read titles and comments easily. But I can't change the font size of the original article. (Have to zoom in the page by pressing cmd+=)

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It might be because the font size is defined in the CSS in pixel units, instead of em, which is a point size (DPI dependent).

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#length-units

If you have a problem reading text on the screen, I suggest you use something like Clearly extension that reformats pages with a much more reading-friendly style.

You don't have to sign up to use this extension : https://evernote.com/clearly/

You can also try to print the page into a PDF and read it like that.

Note that CSS pixels are not the same as physical pixels. Browsers are free to rescale CSS pixel values. Indeed, it's written in the document you linked to:

> If the pixel density of the output device is very different from that of a typical computer display, the user agent should rescale pixel values.

So actually 12px font should look about the same on all output devices, regardless of their physical DPI. But I agree that 12px is rather small for copy text.

12px font also could become very small in the future, if typical computer displays end up having high dpi.

I guess a conforming browser should randomly sample computer displays before deciding how big 1px is.

Serious version: I don't think text like that should make it into a standard.

As the page you linked to says, CSS px is also DPI-dependant, since it's defined as 1/96in. (There's even a diagram showing how one px can be many hardware pixels/dots on high-DPI output)

You might want to take a look at the 'Stylish'[1] extension if you often feel like modifying the CSS on sites you visit.

Personally I got used to changing the zoom all the time, with the amount of sites that solve the DPI problem by multiplying the size of everything by 2.

[1] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...

Find styles: https://userstyles.org/

Thanks. Safari is my main browser. I prefer cmd+= to the extension. I found zooming in Safari is much better than in Chrome. Zooming one tab in chrome makes all tabs zoom. That is ridiculous.

Native speaker agreeing with you that it is an almost instant headache on 13" mbpro[1]. It's all part of being "modern". Font sizes in pixels is one of the many fails of CSS and the web in general.

[1]on iceweasel on debian 8 in virtualbox.

My macbook pro is old (2012, no retina display). I think "font-size: 10pt;" should have same effects on retina and non-retina computers.

well what ever the reasons, the font displays about 75% the size of the HN font. Plus the font itself just looks odd to me.

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