Posted by Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn on 05/29/06 15:09

Chris Tomlinson wrote:

> Hope someone is able to help. I notice when I design a basic HTML page,
> it is affected if a WinXP user has Large Fonts set in their Control Panel.
> However some pages, e.g. www.bbc.co.uk/news are unaffected by this I
> think.

Without looking at the source code, the most likely reason is that the BBC
people know what they do, and therefore they do not use `pt' as unit of
length for displaying fonts on the screen. Because that unit, designed
for printouts instead of the screen, is dependent on the font resolution;
with "Large Fonts" on Windows it is 120 ppi instead of the (1024x786)
default 96 ppi. And the (default) font resolution differs on display
resolutions and window frameworks (Macs have a default of 72 ppi, for
example).

With regard to the source code, I simply trust David Dorward's observation
and see this confirmed (they use `em' instead).

> They are definitely not affected by changing the font size within the
> browser.

"The browser" must be Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or older, because these
UAs are the only ones (to my knowledge) that are unable to scale _px_-sized
fonts. (In that case, it should be possible to scale the fonts on the BBC
Web site because they do not use `px'. Another possibility is to use `%'
instead of `em'.) IE 7 is going to fix at least this issue by allowing for
an Opera-style zoom of the display of Web resources.

This has nothing to do with client-side scripting. Please stop crossposting
from alt.* into Usenet, and please stop crossposting off topic.


F'up2 alt.html

PointedEars
--
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
"The Blanched Soldier"

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