Exercise font size

matthiask
January 07, 2010, 05:02 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi guys, part of my new year resolution is to get the best out of the website, so finally doing the exercises on a regular basis. However, I seriously consider the font sizes too small.

Zooming in does not help as it bugs the JavaScript stuff.

Am I the only one? Do I get old? Can something be done there?

Profile picture
John
January 07, 2010, 06:37 AM

matthias,

A big part of why we wanted to use plain text with javascript was to support text resizing.  I'm surprised to hear it doesn't work well for you.

Can you tell me your OS and browser (plus versions)?

I'm using Chrome on a Mac (typically one of the least-supported modern browsers, but we test it), and text resize works great, even magnifying 4-5 times.

Profile picture
matthiask
January 07, 2010, 07:01 AM

actually, my setting is probably most classic:

Internet explorer 7, Windows Vista

and least classic:

Opera 9.5, windows Vista.

Issue in ie7: zoom destroys the location of the links in exercise 1 (I sent a picture to support@praxislanguage.com)

Issue in ie7: font scaling doesn't feel right (that's certainly not your problem ;) )

Issue in opera: The drag and drop ends up outside of the screen. (hover, drag and targeting works, when releasing, the position of the dialog line gets messed up ( down, right out of the screen)

To be concrete about the font size: As I tried just now, I feel that a font size of 16px by default would enhance the visual quality of the exercise tremendously.

Some tech bla: my intuition tells me, that the lines have a problem with the centering of the page. their origin is in the upper page corner, zooming translates this origin for the webpage, but not for the javascript-drawn lines.

Hope it helps.

matthias

PS: I tend to disagree about the least supported browser, that still seems to be Opera, although it's now in every Wii and Philips Net-TV and others (they are really big in embedded devices)

 

 

 

Profile picture
matthiask
January 11, 2010, 04:59 PM

okay, since I seem to be the only one with bad eyes for Chinese character, I searched myself, found IE7Pro and did a little bit of CSS manipulation. - for me, the problem is resolved now.

Profile picture
daniel70
January 11, 2010, 06:30 PM

Matthiask, I don't think much of the exercises font (or the chinese character font on the vocab and expansion pages). I have a pretty ugly font face, and tiny characters. I would like to show the characters with a different font-family and at a much larger size. I do not want these font settings to apply to english text. I've poked around a little, but did not find a common css class for the chinese text. It seems like an easy enough problem to solve ... but I have not seen the easy solution.

Profile picture
matthiask
January 11, 2010, 08:54 PM

 

Hey daniel70

 

below my simple greasemonkey script:

+++++++++++++++++++++

// ==UserScript==
// @name chinesepod.com
// @namespace http://userstyles.org
// @description playscript for chinesepod

// @author matthiask
// @include http://chinesepod.com/lessons/*/exercises
// @homepage http://chinesepod.com

// ==/UserScript==
(function(){
var css = " span.float-right {font-size:16pt !important;} li div {font-size:16pt !important; line-height:120% !important} #assessment_content ul li {font-size:16pt !important; line-height:120% !important} .width518 {font-size:16pt !important; line-height:120% !important}";
PRO_addStyle(css);
})();

++++++++++++++++++++++++

 It does not solve the problem you describe, but it makes me happy, so there might be a chance that it works for you as well :) Since chinesepod does not have a separate css class for chinese characters, it would be a strong hack to just enlarge the chinese characters.

 

Profile picture
daniel70

Matthiask, thanks for the script, I try it out tomorrow.

Profile picture
matthiask

You are very welcome - and if you use it in firefox, I would be happy to know if it works there. (still wondering how universal the greasemonkeys are)

Profile picture
daniel70

I tried it briefly last night, but I've had zero experience with greasemonkey, so I can't say why it didn't work for me. John mentioned that they were going to monkey around with the css, so I might wait until then before I hit this again. If they put a common class tag on all chinese containing elements, then I'm in business. I was going to hack around with jquery and greasemonkey to try to hit just the chinese text. A change to the css would remove the need for that ... besides, as you know, it's no fun coding against a moving target. I'll stick with ctrl-+ for now, and blow up the whole screen ... fonts are still ugly though.

Profile picture
linda_b
January 11, 2010, 09:57 PM

I just wanted to vote and say that I, too, have problems with my eyes and the character font size. I have been skipping most of the exercises because of that. I was almost on the verge of buying computer glasses.

I discovered just last week the shortcut (at least for Internet Explorer and Firefox) to change the font size (ctrl +/-). The english words end up looking huge in comparison to the chinese characters. It would still be great if there were a way to do the resizing as a feature of CPod. Anyway, I do have a workable solution. Thanks!

Profile picture
daniel70
January 12, 2010, 03:34 AM

Matthiask, thanks for the script, I try it out tomorrow.

Profile picture
matthiask
January 14, 2010, 08:11 PM

You are very welcome - and if you use it in firefox, I would be happy to know if it works there. (still wondering how universal the greasemonkeys are)