font size bug on Conwaylife.com

[Scorbie]

I'm not sure if others also have this bug. When I click the 'Change font size' button on the top right corner of the page, (that looks like vA^)
the font does get smaller, but I cannot make the font return to its original size.

[dvgrn]

I'm not sure if others also have this bug. When I click the 'Change font size' button on the top right corner of the page, (that looks like vA^)
the font does get smaller, but I cannot make the font return to its original size.

The same problem was reported a couple of years ago, with a slightly painful solution. In Google Chrome, I found that removing just the style_cookie didn't seem to work (under Settings / Show Advanced Settings / Content settings / All cookies and site data / search and click on "conwaylife.com", not "www.conwaylife.com"). Deleting three "php..." cookies was probably excessive, but it did the trick. Definitely no need to touch any wiki-related "njohns01home" cookies.

Still seems like a good idea to remove the dangerous font-reduction button...!

[Scorbie]

Thanks. I'll try that out with my laptop after I get back home.

Interestingly, Opera on android seems to be immune to this phenomenon. (On my phone)

[dvgrn]

Thanks. I'll try that out with my laptop after I get back home.

Interestingly, Opera on android seems to be immune to this phenomenon. (On my phone)

Actually, I'm finding that just one thread on the forums is still contaminated by my experimentation this morning, and I can't seem to locate a cookie that I can remove to fix the problem. So far I haven't been able to track down the smoking-gun "A+" content that Andrew mentioned in the above linked thread.

Rumor has it that with enough patience, the problem will go away due to a timeout, so for the time being I guess I'd just recommend that people not give in to the temptation to click on that A^ button...!

[rowett]

This annoyed me enough to go and figure out how it was(n't) working.

There are several stylesheets referenced from the forum pages. The important ones that control the body font size are "print.css" which defines the default:

Code: Select all

body {
	font: 11pt Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	color:#000000;
}

and then three more which override the font-size only:
normal.css

Code: Select all

body {
	font-size: 10px;
}

medium.css

Code: Select all

body {
	font-size: 11px;
}

large.css

Code: Select all

body {
	font-size: 12px;
}

If you've never clicked the font size button then the default 11pt font is used as defined in print.css. The first time you click the font size button it switches to the size defined in normal.css and then each subsequent click it cycles through medium.css, large.css, normal.css and so on.
For those with a good attention to detail you'll have already noticed a problem. The default font size in print.css is defined in points (11pt) whereas the normal, medium and large overrides are define in pixels (10px, 11px, 12px). Pixels are smaller than points so even the large setting is smaller than the default.
The setting is saved in the Cookie called "style_cookie".

Nathaniel:
My suggestion would be to change normal.css, medium.css and large.css to contain something like 9pt, 11pt and 14pt respectively.
For reference the button calls a Javascript function fontsizeup() which is defined in styleswitcher.js.

[Scorbie]

(GASP) Real thanks for finding the bug!

[Nathaniel]

Big thanks to Chris for tracking down the bug. I've updated the CSS files with sizes 10pt, 12pt, and 14pt, and it looks much better to me now. Not sure why 12pt looked more "right" to me than 11pt -- presumably some other CSS file in the mess that is phpBB was over-riding the 11pt from print.css with 12pt from somewhere else.

Can anyone else confirm that the medium font size, when using the "change font size" button, looks OK (or doesn't look OK) on their machine/browser?

[simeks]

Looks fine for me on Windows 7/Chrome!

[dvgrn]

Can anyone else confirm that the medium font size, when using the "change font size" button, looks OK (or doesn't look OK) on their machine/browser?

The three sizes look good now -- I'm also on Chrome in Windows 7.

When I fiddled with the font size, then opened a new conwaylife.com/forums window, the font for the index page showed up really small at first, and wasn't fixable by the "change font size" button.

However, a refresh fixed that, and now I don't get the unreadably small fonts any more no matter what I do. As far as I can tell the fix will work, at least after a cycle or two of opening forum pages.

The only remaining bug that I see is that the "down" and "up" options to the left and right of the "A" change-text-size icon all link to the same place -- so a click on any of the three locations just cycles up through the font sizes, then back to small again.

[Scorbie]

Works fine with windows 8.1/firefox and IE!

When I fiddled with the font size, then opened a new conwaylife.com/forums window, the font for the index page showed up really small at first, and wasn't fixable by the "change font size" button.

Hmm, that doesn't happen in my machine.

The only remaining bug that I see is that the "down" and "up" options to the left and right of the "A" change-text-size icon all link to the same place -- so a click on any of the three locations just cycles up through the font sizes, then back to small again.

You're right, But personally I'm okay with that.

[Andrew]

Works fine in Safari on my Mac -- thanks Chris and Nathaniel!

[gameoflifeboy]

When I used the "Change font" option on Firefox an Ubuntu computer, all 3 font sizes suddenly became very small. Now when I visit the forums, everything is still tiny.

[rowett]

When I used the "Change font" option on Firefox an Ubuntu computer, all 3 font sizes suddenly became very small. Now when I visit the forums, everything is still tiny.

You'll need to refresh the browser (at least once) to have the new styles loaded. Your browser may be using cached versions of the old styles.

The only remaining bug that I see is that the "down" and "up" options to the left and right of the "A" change-text-size icon all link to the same place -- so a click on any of the three locations just cycles up through the font sizes, then back to small again.

It's slightly worse than that. The "vA^" is just a single element (an anchor displayed as a single image), rather than three that point to the same place - in this case a Javascript function called fontsizeup().
Interestingly (perhaps) there is also a Javascript function called fontsizedown(), that does what you'd expect, but it's not linked to anything. Both fontsizeup() and fontsizedown() have code that caters for 5 styles (font sizes) but only three are actually defined in the stylesheets.
Having said all that I'm actually fairly happy with the existing functionality.

[rowett]

Big thanks to Chris for tracking down the bug. I've updated the CSS files with sizes 10pt, 12pt, and 14pt, and it looks much better to me now. Not sure why 12pt looked more "right" to me than 11pt -- presumably some other CSS file in the mess that is phpBB was over-riding the 11pt from print.css with 12pt from somewhere else.

Yes, my mistake actually. "print.css" just defines the point size for "print" media (11pt). The "screen" media is defined in "style.css" as:

Code: Select all

font-size: 100%

which equates to 12pt.