Re: [Fwd: "Document font" pref [was: Re: asking for approval for bug 160454]]

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 27 Jan, 2006, at 5:37 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> ...
> My stance is that any application that shows you long blocks of text 
> should use the document font setting, unless the text ought to be in a 
> fixed width font.
> ...

Pages in a help viewer usually shouldn't be long blocks of text in the 
first place. :-) Help viewer windows are also usually much smaller than 
a typical Web browser window (because you want them visible alongside 
the thing they're providing instructions on). And help authors -- 
unlike Web authors -- hardly ever use fonts smaller than the default 
(if this is even possible in DocBook). All these things make it 
appropriate for Yelp to have a smaller default font than Epiphany does.

Other operating environments already do this: in all versions of 
Windows, and all versions of Mac OS since 8.5, the standard font for 
text in the help viewer has been a small sans-serif (often achieved 
with a deluge of <font> tags), while the default font for the bundled 
Web browser(s) has been a larger serif.

Trying to combine default document font prefs also causes problems with 
ease of configurability. For example, in Windows 98, the text size in 
the Windows help viewer is determined by Internet Explorer's 
preferences; so if you set Internet Explorer's text size to "Smallest", 
much of the text in the help viewer becomes unreadable for many 
applications without any way to fix this in the help viewer itself.

An even closer precedent is that of classic Mac OS, where the Internet 
control panel had a Fonts pane quite similar to that in Gnome. But none 
of the major Web browsers paid attention to it, having their own font 
preferences probably partly because it was more discoverable that way. 
The same thing would likely happen for Epiphany and Firefox under 
Gnome: since it would make no sense for the minimum font size pref and 
the standard font size pref (for example) to be set in entirely 
different programs, the browsers would likely continue to have their 
own GUIs for setting their own individual font prefs.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/