166014 - Preferences only limit minimum font size, not maximum

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Egon Face]

There are very few sites which deliver in font size which is too large; in fact
using a modest resolution such as 1280 * 1025 I find it necessary to increase
the minimum to around 15, but when I view a site like
http://www.theregister.co.uk/ I have to manually reduce the zoom level to get an
acceptable font size. I have mentioned this to the site in question but they
have not responded to date and it occurs to me it would be nice to control this
as well as everything else that Mozilla enables its users to do so well.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Well... A maximum font size would not mean that the _base_ font size is
truncated at that but that _all_ font sizes (including headlines and the like)
are truncated at that size... Is that what you really want?

Comment 2

[Egon Face]

I can't see why <h1> etc. cannot be handled as exceptions, but even if they
cannot I see no harm in limiting all fonts to a maximum of say 16. With all user
preferences its a trade off between the original design and the individual
preferences of the end browser.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Just making sure you know what you're asking for.  ;)

<h1> and so forth can't be exceptions because there's no real way to detect them.

confirming rfe.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

.

Comment 5

[logan]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla
Firebird/0.6.1


http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0231576/inspiron8200/install.htm

I've seen other pages similar to this, but nowhere near as big. CNN sometimes
has this title on their page, that also gets pretty large, letters an inch tall
or so.

Netscape 4 shows this page w/out a massive heading, but I'm guessing it doesn't
know what <big> is or <big><big><big><big><big><big><big><big><big><big> doesn't
mean the same thing to ns4 as mozilla. :)

user_pref("font.maximum-size.x-western", 24); would be nice to see one day. ;)

Comment 6

[logan]

Attachment: huge font test

Comment 7

[logan]

Attachment: patch v1

against mozilla-1.7a

there's no config or documentation changes in this patch, only:
  mozilla/content/base/src/nsRuleNode.cpp
  mozilla/content/shared/public/nsRuleNode.h
  mozilla/layout/base/public/nsIPresContext.h
  mozilla/layout/base/src/nsPresContext.cpp
  mozilla/layout/base/src/nsPresContext.h

Comment 8

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I don't see why we want this.  It's of relatively little value to users, as far
as I can tell.  (I probably should have marked it wontfix years ago.)

Comment 9

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

(Note that if the only reason you want this is because we marked bug 206235
wontfix, then I'd rather have bug 206235 fixed, although I don't think that's
worth it either -- and it's also nonstandard.)

Comment 10

[logan]

just seemed like an obvious pref to complement font.minimum-size.[yadda]

Comment 11

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

There are lots of things we could implement, but then we'd be even bigger than
we already are.  If there's not a good reason for it, then we shouldn't do it.

Comment 12

[logan]

Attachment: huge font test v2 (non-<big>)

I fail to see how this is any different than a pref for the minimum font size.
The diff is 12k, perhaps a total of 2k added...

Reconsideration requested.

Comment 13

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

The pref for minimum font size is extremely useful for accessibility.

Comment 14

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 304283 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[scorched02002]

Maximum font size really needs to be able to be limited.

Comment 16

[Nuno Silva [:njsg]]

I was looking for a setting of this sort in Firefox, and I found this report.

The minimum font size is excellent to ensure that things are readable in some websites, but I really need a counterpart maximum font size setting. Sometimes some parts of a page are too big to read (some parts, not the entire page, so zooming in/out is not a good solution).

Regarding comment 1 and comment 3 (is it for all content?), yes. In fact, sometimes it is exactly H1 and the like that need to be limited.

Regarding comment 8 (demand): it would be of value to me, at the very least. Comment 9 (nested <big>?): No, that's not what I'm looking for, I don't want to disable one way of making too large text, I want to get rid of all the "too large" text.