Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 208515
Too small mozilla fonts used in fedora release notes 5 and 6 for "class code".
Last modified: 2007-04-18 13:50:12 EDT
Description of problem: In the release notes for Fedora 5, some very small fonts are used and it's very hard to read: It is the font used for class code. For example, in the html one finds this: ... These build on the <code class="code">yum</code> utility ... or this: ... a new package manager that replaces <code class="code">system-config-packages</code>. The resulting font used for the words yum and system-config-packages is extremely small compared to the rest of the text. Also the new release notes for Fedora core 6 look like this. It would be nice if this could be fixed. Thanks. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 5.0 How reproducible: found same problem on a PC and a laptop with FC5 Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
Since we're about to release FC6, can you check the latest test release or rawhide for this?
The same tiny fonts are still used in the most recent document for Fedora Core 6 Test 2: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc6test2/ (The problem is that this is what by default every new user of Fedora gets to read as release notes, and it diminishes the quality somewhat)
We probably inherited this setting, and it certainly can be tweaked. Sorry that we didn't get this in our queue to fix for FC6, but we can look into fixing it for an update of the package. This would mean the changes would make it into an ISO respin, and into the page for anyone who does a yum update. I'm adding a couple of our CSS maintainers to the Cc: so this shows up more prominently in their queue.
I think this may be a websites problem, not Docs. The CSS on the f.r.c web site isn't under our control, IIRC -- it's set by the PHP on the site. However, once this stuff is migrated this bug may become obsolete.
Sorry, I wasn't reading carefully. Reiner -- do you see this problem only on fedora.redhat.com, or also from the file in /usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html? If it is only fedora.redhat.com, I think I have the perms to fix that.
I think Paul (post #4) is probably right that it's not a bug in the documentation as such but in the headers that determine what fonts are used for what part of the documents. Carsten: I see the problem on both the local /usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html and for example in http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc6/en_US/. Whenever something (e.g., a command line to call yum) is supposed to appear in a small light grey box, the text within the box is enormously tiny and one has to increase the font size to be able to read it. Fedora documentation is basically the only time I need to increase font size, hardly ever necessary for any other online documents. It is not a bug, but a matter of good visual style in the online documentation: It appears to be no problem for people with very good vision, but would be nice if it could be fixed in the future so it's easier to read the documentation.
This is not an actual "bug" of our CSS; it is a choice of the user's browser. In particular, most browsers (including Firefox) render monospace fonts smaller. Firefox has by default a 12pt font size selected for monospace fonts and a 16pt for sans/serif. If one chooses 16pt for both, then the CSS is rendered correctly. IE does the same, Konqueror gets it "correctly". (If you remove completely the CSS, you will see that the browser still renders the monospace font smaller than the normal one). If we decide to override the default rendering, it can be done in our CSS like this: code, code.screen, pre.screen { font-size: 1.2em; } This is a choice that should be left for the user though.
We discussed pushing this upstream as an RFE, but decided against that. You can feel free to do that directly yourself, via mozilla.org's bug report interface. We are assuming that there is a good reason that Firefox has these settings; they are derived from years of browser building. As usual, one can always override with local preferences, especially when people such as ourselves do not munge the defaults ... if we did that, people who chose to blow up the monotype font would suddenly have huge letters in their page.