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#76 2008-08-11 23:18:03
- uli
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- From: Cologne
- Registered: 2006-08-15
- Posts: 4,316
Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
The globe icon for external link should go after the link, where probably everyone is used to find it (see any wiki). Here the globes actually become a bulleted list.
Also, the globe doesn’t speak for itself like the well-known arrow pointing out of a page symbol.
Performing a search: The grey color used for the normal text is way too light, almost unreadable, even with dimmed light. It should be at least the tone of the nav links “BASICS/HOW TO” etc. if not black. The accentuations for the found term could be coloured if you think the current grey is too subtle with a darker font color.
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Checking things out on my mac at home.
A lot of the font-sizes are dropping below 10px which makes them very small. This is noticeable if you use a browser which does not set a minimum font-size or turn off the minimum font-size in Firefox (or browser of choice).
In camino the table of contents on an individual page and the code snippets are really hard to read. In Safari the fonts don’t get anti-aliased because they are so small making them even harder to read.
I think it’s just an issue of the UL cascade being a pain with the relative sizes.
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Uli, I never did like that globe anyway so thanks for your suggestions. OK now?
And I made search results readable. Well spotted.
Patrick, yes it was ul cascade and initial TOC being set to 80%. Is it OK now? Or does it occur anywhere else besides TOC?
I’d like to sort out the code colours. Should I turn them off? Personally I think the code is more readable without colours, and Uli agrees, and possibly Patrick also prefers it without colours too. To change the colours it means hacking these files and possibly others too. Anyone care to do it?
Even with background white, code is not particularly readable.
Last edited by zero (2008-08-12 11:43:23)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
I am with Patrick on some of the font-sizes but then you probably expected me to be didn’t you Peter? I don’t set minimum font sizes in my browsers either. I like to see sites the way they were designed then magnify them if necessary with “Ctrl +”. Anyway I am looking at this page and for me the code font is too small. I think if it were a little larger it might also help with the “colouring” though I also agree that code is probably more readable as a single colour. I can also see on that page that simple text is being coloured. In this line:-
<p>Comments are turned off for this article.</p>the word “for” is yellow.
I don’t think anyone would be really insistent on code-colouring for a reference site of this type. I could be wrong of course. ;)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
TOC looks good, code samples are still rendering at about 9.5px changing the font-size in pre from 100% to 1.1em kicks it up at least above 10px.
Are the style rules hard coded in those files?
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
While I can’t speak for all coders (I’m a curious mix: a half-ass coder with a biiig user hat in the cupboard) I’d say the syntax highlighting is more hassle than its worth in Textbook.
When coding in text editors, sure, colours are great but each coder prefers their own scheme so you can’t possibly please us all here. Some even like coding in green-on-black or (even worse) white-on-blue like the old MS DOS editors. Bleurgh. So I’m with the opinions expressed so far on this one: increase the font size a tad and ditch the colours if you can; just have the code block with a subtle background colour and/or border to separate it and I’m a happy bunny.
Last edited by Bloke (2008-08-12 13:48:47)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Thanks, folks, looks like we’re all agreeing on this one.
I’ve taken the code colours away, not sure if all of them, but hopefully.
For the code I have this: {font: normal 1.1em “courier new”, courier, monospace;}
For inline code I have this {font: bold 1.1em “courier new”, courier, monospace; } I had a background colour on inline code for a while but have removed it for readability reasons. It’s difficult because it is OK for some articles but not for others.
Is the font size now OK? Mac users, which monospace font do you normally use?
My stylesheet is adapted from the default, so I keep changing it as necessary but there are things overriding and things I don’t understand yet, so I’m taking it bit by bit because I don’t want to change something and then find it’s affecting other things. But we’re getting there :-)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Much more readable without the colour. Nice. The <pre> font still looks a tad small on Firefox 2 here. Note to self: upgrade one day.
btw, looking at the the page the bombsite mentioned earlier, have you any idea how to add more whitespace around (specifically below) the code blocks? It appears a teensy bit cramped to me. I tried:
pre {
margin-bottom:2em;
}which sort of worked but some of the dotted borders disappeared under the <h3> tags. Varying the amount of margin gave limited degrees of success; sometimes it removed the dotted border below <pre> tags that butted up to <p> tags; sometimes only when they were adjacent to other <hN> tags. It’s all very confusing.
Regardless, some amount of whitespace below, or even to the sides by an em or two, might just make the document seem less claustrophobic. Yes I’m nitpicking now and may well start quoting the designers’ rules of proximity, sorry. You’re doing a sterling job.
Y’know, I’m sure about 80% of a typical implementation goes into pissing around with CSS rules to make stuff look right across major browsers. Think of how much time us developers would save if all browsers could render stuff right first time! *dreams*
Last edited by Bloke (2008-08-12 14:45:54)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Font-size is looking teeny tiny on FF3 too. I think the issue is it’s not actually in a code block. It’s actually pre.code.
I did kind of like the borders around the code samples so you could easily distinguish the code bits from just text but I’m ok without if people didn’t like them.
Bloke said:
Y’know, I’m sure about 80% of a typical implementation goes into pissing around with CSS rules to make stuff look right across major browsers. Think of how much time us developers would save if all browsers could render stuff right first time! dreams
But then I wouldn’t have a job :)
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
I can’t figure you guys out, what are you seeing? There’s plenty of whitespace around code. The code still has borders. Please send a link or screenshot.
pre.pre, pre.code and code are all 1.1em. If I go bigger I know some it will break for some people. I hope you’ve used the zoom, Patrick. btw, what’s the default mac monospace font?
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Well I’m on FF3 and the code blocks look fine now, readable font-size, padding, borders and no colours.
I’ll check with some other browsers just to be sure though.
EDIT: Opera and IE7 look fine to me. With Safari(Win) the code font-size is still a little small though I have always found that browser to display text a little different to other browsers. In IE6 the code font is fine but the main content fonts are a little smaller than in FF3, still readable though.
Last edited by thebombsite (2008-08-12 17:42:39)
Stuart
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
Yup, FF3 here at home looks good. Dunno why FF2 showed it so small earlier. I did a Big Daddy Refresh as well *shrug*
I can live with the margins as they are; guess I just love white space.
Nice work, sir njm,,wexcv65w2xcxd [my cat approves as well, it seems]
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
I’ve made the code font a massive 1.3em courier new so it’s bigger than the surrounding verdana body font. If 1em body font isn’t big enough then I don’t know what is. People will surely use a different resolution or increase their text size if they are having problems with that size, after all it is bigger than most, which was pointed out earlier in this thread to be about .75em, at least that’s what’s on txp.com. So are we all happy with the fonts, borders, colours now?
If so, I’m ready to transfer it across. I’ve updated Textpattern Semantic Model and Detailed Installation Instructions with images. I don’t think other articles which had images before necessarily need them at the moment, so I will update some of those in the future.
I think we should use this dokuwiki textbook for the sake of the users. Everyone seems in agreement it’s better than the existing one. I don’t think we should let transfer hassles get in the way of making Textpattern and Textbook better. There is going to be some hassle, however, because I’ve had some precondition failed when editing anything in dev, also when trying to save after uploading an image. I’m pretty sure it is permission settings, owner and group.There will be hassles with permissions if we don’t get it right first time. Dokuwiki writes to the server as www-data. It writes things in meta, index and cache folders. I can’t delete these now because I’m not the owner! But they will need emptying from time to time I should think. I wanted to empty them after transferring the tags without colours, so people didn’t pick up old data. (Perhaps that’s what caused the disappearing dotted lines).
So all I’m saying really is that if I do the uploading, what permissions should I have, what groups do I belong to, etc so it will go smoothly, and so it doesn’t cause permission problems when editing, uploading images etc? I might need to plan it with you beforehand, Patrick.
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Re: [wiki] A New Textbook
zero wrote:
If so where exactly would you put it and how much?
I was thinking at the bottom of that article where there are three fairly closely-spaced blocks. But for some reason, it’s not a problem now the monospace font’s bigger. Beforehand, it just seemed to swamp the code inside the block and the larger fonts around it appeared to crowd it in. Now the fonts are ‘equivalent’ and easier to read, the spacing seems fine. Weird how I interpreted it as a spacing issue when it wasn’t. Stupid brain.
For the record I would have either:
- put maybe half-to-one em more space below the code blocks that butted up to the next
<p>tag to give them some breathing room and make it a tiny bit more visually obvious that the text above the block was related to the block itself and not the one before it - indented the code block by 1 em on both sides to separate it from the page flow as your eye scans the page
But as it stands now, it looks fine so don’t worry about the ramblings of a non-designer such as myself.
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