In case anyone wonders why Felix and Chris and some of the other regulars
keep emphasizing the point of respecting the user's font size - and
designing your page to allow for different font sizes - I experienced a
vivid illustration of this last night.
I've been shopping for a car, mostly looking on Craigslist, when I saw a
commercial for vehix.com and thought I'd check it out. The first thing I
noticed was that some of the text in the Find Your Car and Sell Your Car
boxes was cut off at the bottom. But no worries, I could at least see half
of the Continue button that I needed to click in the Find Your Car box. So I
selected the Used button, entered my zip code and clicked Continue.
The next page has large buttons to select Make, Body Style, etc. I clicked
the Make button and it popped open a nice looking box with a list of makes
in it in four columns. But each column was cut off at the bottom. It skipped
from Cadillac to Eagle, and Infiniti to Lexus. Where's the Kia I was looking
for? Chrysler? Volvo? Hello?
So I used the Web Developer Toolbar to disable my minimum font size setting
in Firefox. That made the text in this popup a little smaller, and I could
now see some of the makes that were missing. But the bottom of each column
is still cut off, so Dodge is still missing, along with Land Rover and
several others.
I had a hunch about what the problem must be, checked it out in Firebug, and
sure enough: the font in this popup is in a 'pt' size, but the popup itself
is in a 'px' size with overflow:hidden.
My ThinkPad has a very high density display - 145 pixels per inch - and I
have Windows set to the 120 logical DPI ("large fonts") setting. A 'pt'
sized font is 25% bigger on my display than it is on the standard 96 DPI
Windows setting.
25% bigger text without a bigger box to put it in and overflow:hidden = cut
off text.
The designers at Vehix thought they could control the font size in my
browser, but it just doesn't work that way. So I'm back to Craigslist, where
the text is plain and simple and I can read it.
-Mike
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