[lug] New to the scene of RPM building.

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 15:20, Elyse M. Grasso wrote:
> I opened it in both Mozilla and Konqueror and the problem seems to be that 
> they are rendering with different fonts. Konqueror is consistently sans serif 
> and generally a larger point size. 

I just tried Konqueror and the font sizes are generally larger there
than in Firebird.  Also, the fonts used in the summary block (the text
under the project logo on the right) are definitely different.  But the
defaults for both browsers seem to fit within the box as designed
(albeit with not much room to spare).

I need to double check what my font types are - I think I used verdana
but maybe I left georgia in there.  That would probably cause lots of
issues on Unix boxes.

> For what it's worth, I think the Konqueror version is much more legible, 
> except for the places where things overlap because of the size differences. 
> The teensy italic white-on-brown text in the MuseSig box is really obnoxious 
> in the mozilla rendering, but Konqueror version is quite nice. 

Hmm.  Firebird does well with that text.  Konqueror uses the wrong font
(sans-serif), at least from what I was wanting it to use.  I probably
need to clean up the font list for all the project themes.  In general,
though, Konqueror 3.1 renders pretty much the way I wanted it to.  I'm
just not that happy with the quality of the JPEG rendering in
Konqueror.  Firebird seems much cleaner.  I *did* have PNG backgrounds
with tranparency originally.  Looked great in Firebird.  Looked like a
WWII battleground in IE.  *sigh*  So I switched to JPEGs with the theme
background merged into the transparency to get the effect I was after. 
Hack.  Stupid IE.  I wrote a template system to be able to switch themes
easily that is now at the mercy of merging backgrounds into images
because of IE.  I'd like to totally ignore IE if I could.

One thing I noticed that is really weird - the front page in Konqueror
took a long time before it displayed any links or text.  Might be
because there is a Flash animation on that page and Konqueror had to
time out trying to play it before rendering the rest of the page.  But
the links and text showed up after a while.  (The animation was
generated using Ming, a PHP front end that can generate flash animations
without having to have any flash libraries, etc.  Kinda cool.  I may
have to do an article on that.)

> I use Konq except for Web sites that won't work with it, so Mozilla's settings 
> are probably defaults and Konq's may have been customized somewhere along the 
> line. I suspect that if I changed Mozilla's minimum font size to something 
> legible, the display in Mozilla might break the same way Konq's is broken.

Optimally the browser should be set to use the font settings I
configured in the CSS, but I realize that its easier (re: more legible)
for users to set their own fonts because many sites just don't do a good
job with fonts. Eric Meyer's books don't explain how to plan for that
situation, unfortunately.  But he (and the Zen Garden - I use their
CSS/HTML templates div configurations for all my pages) did teach me how
to get rid of tables.  Woohoo!

Thanks for the feedback.  I'll see if I can grab a Mozilla 1.4 to test
against too.  There must be an RPM for that around somewhere.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.