185990 - microsoft.com - font-size: xx-small unreadable in Linux

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P2)

Description

[Matthew Brewer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

Opening www.Microsoft.com produces the microsoft home page, but it is squeezed
together really tight making the text unreadable and distorting the images.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open Mozilla 1.3 alpha
2.Type www.microsoft.com in teh location bar or choose it from Debug, Verification.
3.The page appears distorted.

Actual Results:  
The page doesn't turn out like it should.  It is only a problem in this version
of Mozilla I believe, can't tell you on that one.  I know it isn't a problem
with Konquerer and IE.

Expected Results:  
It should have displayed the text and pictures just like the other browsers.

I am still running the Modern theme, but it does it the same on classic too.

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

Page looks good to me, can you attach a screenshot?

Build 2002121708, Windows 2000.

Comment 2

[Adam Lock]

-> Browser-general

Comment 3

[Andrew Schultz]

Attachment: screenshot

screenshot with linux trunk 20021217

the page has this:
TD {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica; font-size: xx-small;}

Comment 4

[Felix Miata]

Attachment: screenshot of IE6 @ 1024 x 768

Can't read it using IE6 either. There's virtually no rendering difference
between Mozilla and IE6 at 1024 x 768 using default settings for both. What
resolution and monitor size are you using?

Comment 5

[Andrew Schultz]

my screenshot was from 1280x1024 on a 17" monitor.
the problem appears to be that Mozilla/Linux's font sucks.  This is because it's
using an outline scaled font.  An Xft build using truetype fonts looks a lot
better (font is the same size, just readable).

If you want to prevent Mozilla from using outline scaled fonts for such small
fonts, you can set the pref "font.scale.outline.min" in your prefs.js/user.js. 
The default is 6.  Raising it to 10 forced Mozilla to use bitmap fonts for the
Microsoft page, which look better.

Comment 6

[David Nesting]

Yah, the fonts on the site are extremely small, but that's apparently the way
Microsoft wants it, since that's what they're specifying in their style sheets
(xx-small).  The only suggestion I can personally give would be to use the "Text
Zoom" features in the View menu to try scaling everything up.

Comment 7

[Frankie]

You really Really REALLY should turn on Mozilla's minimum font size preference.

Comment 8

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

-> evang500

Comment 9

[Felix Miata]

Those who find xx-small objectionable might be interested in bug 187256. That
patch has already been tested to improve the M$ home page considerably.

Comment 10

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Comment 11

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Is this still an issue ?

Comment 12

[Felix Miata]

1-Microsoft's home page CSS no longer includes xx-small anywhere

2-We floor xx-small at 9px, so as long as the user maintains an adequate default setting, xx-small should at least be readable