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Text resolution issues

Art Vandelay

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May 8, 2004
Messages
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Lately, I've been having problems with text. I can read normal text on this forum fine, but not the small print stuff. And it's not just this website; for instance, on the TelevisionWithoutPity homepage, the titles are legible, but the text underneath is not. Currently, the episode on the top of the page is a Farscape episode, and I can read "Whoreold and Fraud" just fine, but
"Farscape - Crichton, Zhaan, and D'Argo put on their Sunday best ...." is almost unreadable (of course, now that I've cut and pasted it, it's perfectly legible. I've tried resizing my desktop, but that just makes the text bigger, it doesn't actually change the resolution.
 
What kind or monitor do you use? Is your eyesight fine? Have you made any changes to your browser?
 
Try turning off, or on anti-aliasing of text. On Windows XP there are three options for this ClearType, "standard" and none. I don't remember exactly where the setting is but try right-clicking the desktop, select Properties. I think it's under one of those tabs.

On the OS X on the Mac - Apple Menu, System Preferences, Appearance, Font Smoothing style at the bottom of the dialog. I use Medium.
 
Donks said:
What kind or monitor do you use? Is your eyesight fine? Have you made any changes to your browser?
Click to expand...
1. CRT. Don't know anything more specific than that.
2. Yeah, it's fine. The text isn't blurry; it just doesn't have enough detail.
3. Actually, my installation of FireFox roughly coincides with my noticing this. And I only seem to have this problem with Explorer. Hmmm. Are they sabotaging the competition?
 
You can resize the font used on most webpages by holding CTRL and turning the mousewheel. Thing is, that is also something that is easy to do accidentally, and some pages (such as the JREF forum) use fixed fontsizes (evil!) that do not change, so you don't notice that you are changing the standard font size.

Just hold CTRL and scroll down the mouse wheel.
 
What I do is over-ride what fonts web sites use. In firefox, go to tools >> options, then the content tab. Go to 'advanced' under the fonts & colors heading. You can choose the fonts web pages will display and their sizes, and/or choose a default minimum font size. If you uncheck "allow pages to choose their own fonts" then Firefox will display pages with your font and size selections regardless of the sites' coding.

However, sites coded with fixed width columns and the like probably won't look too good. For example, IGN looks terrible with my larger fonts, since the layout won't accomodate them. That is the only site I visit that looks bad, though, so I keep my settings as they are.
 
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Mongrel said:
If you're using Firefox the default shortcuts for Font size are CTRL and numpad + and - , larger and smaller. CTRL 0 will reset to the default
Click to expand...
It appears that the other + and - keys also work. However, as I said, this only isa a problem with Explorer. It appears that perhaps installing Firefox somehow messed up Explorer.
 
Hmmm - have you checked your fonts in IE? Tools > Internet Options > Fonts, my system at work has Times New Roman for Web and Courier New for plain text. I had a similar problem after mucking about with Unicode fonts..

Another thing that may help, but is useful anyway if you want to use Firefox, is this extension. It allows you to open an IE tab within Ff
 
Art Vandelay said:
It appears that the other + and - keys also work. However, as I said, this only isa a problem with Explorer. It appears that perhaps installing Firefox somehow messed up Explorer.
Click to expand...
Have you installed the IE 7.0 Beta by any chance? If you have, it uses ClearType by default. In my opinion, text in ClearType looks absolutely horrible and difficult to read. If you have installed IE 7 Beta, you can turn off ClearType in the Internet Options menu.
 
The other thing that occurs to me is to check the dpi settings under Control Panel>Display>Settings>Advanced>General. This sometimes gets set to something odd and makes text appear weird. I usually notice this when using a laptop through a docking station on a normal monitor.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
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