Feature Request: "old" HTLAL fonts

[tommus]

I have been reading both htlal.com and htlal.org every day. And I noticed that somehow I felt more comfortable over on htlal.com. I have come to the conclusion that a big part of that comfort came from the font and the clear, crisp, open look-and-feel. I just did some sort of comparison by copying bits of each site into Open Office and comparing the fonts. Now I know that different browsers may be adjusting fonts a bit so this may not be an exact comparison. But my results were:

htlal.com: Verdana; Arial; Helvetica; sans-serif 17.1

htlal.org: Lucida Grande 15.8

Now I don't know why htlal.com showed several fonts because the sample was just from within a paragraph in the body of a post. Clearly, htlal.com has slightly larger default fonts, and I think that is part of reason I like it better. Also, HTLAL text is consistently the same, crisp black on a white background while htlal.org has a variety for the body of the comments (not just in the quoted areas), both background and degree of black or grey.

Looking back on when I first joined htlal.com almost seven years ago, I now think the font, the clarity, and the consistency were all part of what appealed to me, and kept me coming back.

So I think we should get members' comments of font size, type, etc. If it is possible to adjust the font on htlal.org to user preference, I think that would be good. My clear preference is for the htlal.com font, size and general look-and-feel.

[daegga]

A quick fix from the user side would be to disable web fonts in your browser, how you do it depends on your browser. I think for Chrome and Firefox there are plugins that let you do it depending on the web page, but I haven't tested it.
This phpBB style will fall back to the same fonts as HTLAL: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

For font size most browsers let you zoom (ctrl+'+'). I even find the font on old HTLAL too small.

[Hrhenry]

I'm with you on bigger fonts. On screens with higher pixel density, particularly mobile devices, the new forum is a little harder to read. Mobile Chrome isn't the best at overriding default fonts either, in my experience.

R.
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[rdearman]

I've done a little digging around and it looks like the font size is provided with the default theme. I was hoping it would be something simple like just change it in your user preferences, but that option doesn't appear to be available and it looks like font size is a global setting in the theme. I'll talk to emk and see if we want to risk installing another theme as one of his experimental features.

[tommus]

I agree that each user can take steps to adjust the fonts and sizes, and the look-and-feel to some extent. But most won't, for various reasons. And potential new users won't do it immediately. You only get one chance to make a first impression. So in the interest of attracting and keeping new users, I believe it is in our best interest to have a very attractive default look-and-feel. Now I recognize that not everyone will prefer the same things. But maybe the success of HTLAL over many years can lead us to suspect that its look-and-feel was perhaps a positive factor that set it apart from many other sites, and helped attract so many serious language learners.

[emk]

I agree that each user can take steps to adjust the fonts and sizes, and the look-and-feel to some extent. But most won't, for various reasons. And potential new users won't do it immediately. You only get one chance to make a first impression. So in the interest of attracting and keeping new users, I believe it is in our best interest to have a very attractive default look-and-feel. Now I recognize that not everyone will prefer the same things. But maybe the success of HTLAL over many years can lead us to suspect that its look-and-feel was perhaps a positive factor that set it apart from many other sites, and helped attract so many serious language learners.

I would also be in favor of improving the font. It's hard to adjust font sizes in some mobile browsers, and the default should not assume 20-year-old eyes on an expensive, high-end laptop!.

At the moment, this involves editing the theme, I think, which in turns requires having some way to track our changes so the site doesn't become a unmaintainable mess that never gets upgraded again. This, in turn, requires getting some more information from the web host, and importing the source code into a public GitHub repo.

I agree it's worth having good fonts, but we need to get some config info from the webhost and wait until rdearman has some free time. Then I'll recreate my manual changes to the current code and put everything in a public repo, where people can download it and experiment. Baby steps.

[Doitsujin]

@tommus:

You can change the font with a one-line Firefox Greasemonkey script (also works with the Chrome TamperMonkey extension):

Code: Select all

// ==UserScript==
// @name        HTLAL font fixer
// @include     *how-to-learn-any-language.org*
// @grant       GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==

// adjust font, font size and font color according to your preferences
GM_addStyle(".content {font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: green; font-size: 14px !important; }");


Simply install Greasemonkey, copy the above code to the clipboard and select Use Script from Clipboard from the Greasemonkey menu.
Then customize the style definition in the last line to your liking. For example, you may want to remove color: green;, which I added for testing purposes.

[tommus]

You can change the font with a one-line Firefox Greasemonkey script.

That works well. I already had greasemonkey installed for the good scripts on htlal.com. Thanks very much.

[Cavesa]

Well, I am dealing with the font now with ctrl+ but I agree it would be nice.

I agree as well with the idea of making a nicer first impression and I'd say having another theme than the default one used by thousands of forums would be certainly be a benefit. But I can totally see this is probably a low priority compared to other issues in need of solving.