Hacker News Reader

Comment by clicks | Hacker News Reader

> When I'm done reading applications, I'll add a little tweak to HN to make the fonts super big for all the users over 80.

I'm in my mid-20s, I did not vote dishonestly in this poll, but I wish you'll make the change for me anyway.

The small font on a 1080p screen (13" screen) is practically unreadable for me. I have to zoom in about 150% to make out anything.

View on HN

Some browsers have a handy feature called "minimum font size."

Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/m2doXpX.png

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimum-font/pofdg...

The images and everything else would still be unusually small though.

Some of us old farts use Ctrl + to get around such issues.

That's what OP was using, and someone else was suggesting to use a minimum font size instead. I wonder if there is a way to change the zoom level at the OS if everything is too small, not just the web browser, but that would defeat the purpose of having an hd screen.

Also does the zoom level in your browser affect the resolution of videos/images? It seems like it would.

Most OS have the possibility to adjust screen dot pitch (ppi, pixels per inch). Using a "high resolution" display (like my 23"@2048x1152, or an Apple "retina" display).

Technically, setting your font to be eg 14 points, should be an absolute size - the same font should be the same dimensions (in mm/inches) on all displays. Now, you probably hold your smartphone closer to your face than you sit to your 30" LCD screen -- so that might not really be what you want (same font size on your phone and on your desktop screen).

Additionally this only works for scalable graphics -- which is why Apple went trough such hoops to make retina displays usable -- quadruple the dot pitch on screens, and all icons and bitmaps become miniatures.

Personally I just use the browser zoom-function -- I find most sites use too small fonts, and end up with too wide text columns (which is somewhat alleviated by not browsing full screen, but in a "long" window).

Anyway, the following might be of interest:

Xorg, dpi: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_D...

Windows (8) dpi/zoom: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3153/~/ad...

Some notes from Microsoft on writing DPI-aware applications: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd464646(VS.85).aspx

On Windows, devs rarely care about DPI issues, largely because they either never heard about the problems, thought "oh my GUI abstraction will take care of it" or think that the market share of non-standard DPI settings is too low.

Yes. It's annoying. Asus has a 13-inch 1080p Windows 7 laptop and everything so tiny that it is basically unusable out of the box.

Android does not have this problem since devs always use dp (density independent pixel) as units of measurement and OEMs choose good DPI values when they are releasing devices.

Although less gracefully, iOS solves this problem too (by doubling the resolution and scaling everything by two).

The problem is, it is annoying to manually zoom in on every single website. It should be automatic.

That is why one should scale images in ems. Old enough to remember when programming.

I've used a minimum font size of 16 for years in Safari, and boy does it break most layouts, mostly because of the size mismatch with images.

Hardly anything remains usable - I had to install this extension to go along with it: http://www.cerimorgan.com/products/zoombysite/

You need minimum zoom, not minimum font size. Unfortunately Safari does not have that, which is one of the reasons I do not use it.

Depends. HN works best with Safari's minimum font size, which nicely brings all the fonts to a uniform, readable size. For every other site I use ZoomBySite to find the zoom level at which the layout starts working.

This doesn't actually work in Chrome, you have to also set a user stylesheet to override the -webkit- css property that forces exact pixel sizes of fonts.

Chrome has a default zoom setting. I have it at 150%.

Have you considered a user.js script? I'm using one to fill in the white borders and wrap comments at a reasonable width:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @match https://news.ycombinator.com/*
  // ==/UserScript==
  (function () {
    document.body.style.backgroundColor = "#f6f6ef";
    var s = document.createElement('style');
    s.innerText = "td.default {max-width: 40em; }";
    document.head.appendChild(s);
  })()

(For Chrome, name the file hn.user.js and drag/drop it onto the chrome://extensions page.)

If you just want to increase font size for a website/short time. Almost every browser can do so by doing ctrl(cmd)+ or -.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com