Font zoom, FireBug, and failing eye sight
My eyes aren't exactly top notch. In fact, my vision is pretty bad. In the last few years, I've been finding myself squinting and/or moving a reading target away or towards my face to find the right spot where everything is clear. Old before my time, perhaps.
At any rate, I've increasingly been using font zoom when reading blog entries that were clearly written for eagles. This has helped a great deal, but more often than not, the content will be in a fixed width container, so as the font size increases, the text measure decreases. It's still annoying to read the content because it's now awkwardly thin.
FireBug to the rescue
So here's my less than perfect, but relatively simple fix:
- Right click in the content area and select Inspect Element
- Look for a width setting in the style tab. If you don't find one, browse up the node tree until you do
- Change the width declaration from pixels to ems. I find about 35ems to be a good width for me
- (optional) Taking stock of the design impact you've now made, find other major fixed width elements and change their units to ems, tweaking size as needed to put things more or less back in place
- Enjoy the zoomed in reading with said crappy eyes
- Profit?
This of course assumes you are browsing in Firefox and that you have Joe Hewitt's excellent FireBug extension installed. I can understand choosing a different browser (so long as it's not IE) but if you're using Firefox and you have anything to do with web development, you have no excuse not to have FB installed.
Incidentally, this blog uses ems for its structural dimensions, so scale the font size to your heart's content.
Update
Turns out this post was coincidentally timed with a similar read from a different (read: opposite) perspective.
I'm surprised, that text measure wasn't addressed as a relationship between the font/word size, but I find the discussion of visual degrees interesting.
From this, it seems I prefer not to move my seat, but attempt to zoom the entire site. Practically, I'm only interested in the content, so font scaling serves the purpose. If I want to read a page from a particular distance (typically from within natural reach of my keyboard and mouse), and I anticipate spending a few minutes consuming it, I am willing to resize my browser window to fit readable font size with text measure in tact.
1 Comment
November 8, 2007 2:16 PM Isaac Z. Schlueter
This is an interesting take on the situation, thanks for the ping.
I think we're both ultimately running into the same fundamental problem: font scaling and zooming are two different things. They're related, but not exactly the same. Divorcing them entirely can cause problems (as you point out) but marrying them too closely can cause other problems (as I point out in my article.)
Perhaps the better (short-term) solution would be a browser plugin to allow the user to easily and temporarily resize a block element to a fixed font-size and width, perhaps in a popup or position:absolute overlay so that the underlying page wouldn't be disrupted unnecessarily. The advantage here would be that the user could customize a fixed column width and font-size to their preference. I'm not sure what the ideal long-term solution is. It's a very tricky problem that took the printing industry millenia to address with any degree of success.