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Posted by dorayme on 09/21/06 22:43
In article
<Pine.LNX.4.64.0609211204170.32512@ppepc87.ph.gla.ac.uk>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, dorayme wrote:
>
> > "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> ...
> > > you can use CSS to size them in em units. See discussion at
> > > http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/img-em-size.html
> >
> > Yes, may I add a thought: In general, deterioration in quality is
> > far more noticeable in scaling up than down. It is true of even
> > good image editors for reasons that are not hard to understand.
> > And it would likely be even more true of lower class image
> > editing functions in browsers. So, website makers that do want to
> > occasionally employ this em based dimensioning should consider
> > allowing the natural size to be a little bigger than what they
> > guess would be the ideal for the majority of users text size
> > settings.
>
> Agreed. I had a dim recollection of trying to say something very
> similar myself - maybe it was somewhere in a usenet posting - but it
> seems it didn't actually get onto my web page yet. I'll add a comment
> about it.
>
> thanks
Obviously, there are alternative strategies for deciding on the
em size. I was looking at your figures and thinking "mmm, go down
an order of mag, halve ..." and so on, in other words trying to
formularise. Not saying you said to do this! I am sure you would
urge some trial and error. On this theme:
Everything depends. In a case where I wanted a particular
"text-heading" to go up and down but nevertheless be an image, I
made one that I judged to be about right for a case of tired/poor
eyesight (or plain wanting to sit right back from a screen)
without being too extreme. The reason for this criterion is that
any enlargement will be a deterioration, so obviously best to
make it as big as any somewhat natural extremity. That gets the
size at one end. If really extreme text enlargements are
attempted, it is not the end of the world, it becomes a bit less
crisp. (Bandwidth considerations played no part here, the image
was black on white and tiny over a range of possible sizes)
Now I had to decide the em size for the css. For this, I went
down to what I regarded as the most likely size of text. An
uncertain quest, true... but one can force oneself to decide by
imagining putting a weeks wages on it and losing if you are more
than 10% out after a thorough investigation by a top research
program into people's habits. You play around till the pic is the
size that you would have a text heading. Roughly. I did this by
actually having a real text heading, 180 or 200% above normal to
compare above the imaged text (deleted/commented out later). This
gets the proportion as well.
It then stays sharp for smaller (keener sighted) and bigger too
up to a reasonable limit.
Luckily, in the case of a text heading, there are some guidelines
that are at least intuitively understood. But other pics in other
situations might require different comparisons.
I wanted Dom Casual for a heading of one page of a story (small
amusement for children and playful adults). Here is the page
concerned:
http://tinyurl.com/kldmb
--
dorayme
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