469303 - nearly impossible to set font size

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 601339

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.18 (20081105)

The font settings are

1) in pixels !!! (never seen a system that can change the display mode or even connect to a different display?)

2) separate for each of about dozen locales.

When the default font size does not work for you .. guess it's time to switch mail clients then.

I can understand that in some very special cases (like when you have broken font that renders in completely different size although it's the same size as the other fonts) you want the font size separate for different locales. But in most cases you just want the letters the same size, or perhaps with some size adjustment to make the complex characters a bit larger (say, Chinese -> +2pt)



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
I cannot set the font size without clicking 100+ times on various controls.

I have to set new font size every time DPI changes.

Expected Results:  
I can set font size easily, and the size sticks even if I use a remote display or change the display mode.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Re (1), that's bug 186718 for SeaMonkey. Specifying fonts in pixels is rather confusing for many users who are familiar with point sizes. The DPI values should be known from the system or the layout.css.dpi preference setting, thus it should be possible to translate between pixels and points (as is done for menu and pane fonts anyway already). If the DPI setting changes while the application is running, this may present a special case and may not be handled properly unless sizes are recalculated.

Re (2), I'm using fonts for a specific region (Western) myself only, but I could imagine use cases where one would like different fonts in, e.g., Western vs. Asian regions (note also that those are not per locale but per region).

Comment 2

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(1) - it would be great to move to points instead of pixels

(2) - part of the reason I've been working on bug 452711 is because of this problem.  The current locale (mine is Western) as well as the 'Other Languages' (i.e. UTF-8) needs to be set to whatever the user chooses for their default.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

There has been another Thunderbird bug filed specific to the pixel/points issue, which I just confirmed to cover (1) so that the bug here can cover (2) as necessary. I can't tell to which extent (2) is implemented in bug 452711.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

rsx11m, is this OS=all?

Comment 5

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

I guess 452711 covers the issue with setting font sizes for all locales.

There is still room for improvement but the Firefox dialog is usable.

The use of screen pixels in font settings is braindead and is covered by 186718 for Mozilla.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> The use of screen pixels in font settings is braindead and is covered by bug 186718 for Mozilla.

And bug 507795 for Thunderbird.

Should we dup this (and bug 382272?) to bug 601339 which has more context?
(I haven't double checked all the details)

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Undupe if this doesn't make sense