font customization

[Lucio Chiappetti]

In the attempt to overcome my presbyopia and related postural problems, I have just got a new 24" screen (521mm x 293mm 1920x1080 pix) and I'm attempting to adjust the fonts of my terminals (xterm, urxvt), editors, X11 decorations and browser i.e. Palemoon for optimal viewing from a comfortable distance.

For web pages I've set the Content->Advanced->minimum font size to 18 and that looks fine for most pages, an occasional control plus or control minus zoom will take care of the rest on a few pages.

Question 1 (curiosity) : is it correct that pale moon will remember the zoom session to session (for all pages of a given site ? I got this impression during the tests. (anyhow I am using the session manager plugin)

Question 2 : how can I control the fonts of the menu bar, navigation bar etc. They look not in about:config, is there some X resources I may have forgotten ?

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I found myself the answer to question 2.
I had a similar problem 5 years ago, when I wanted to change the background colour of menus in firefox, openoffice and acrobat which had become an ugly dark gray after OS reinstallation. Apparently these are GTK controlled, so I had to disable all GTK themes (revert to traditional) with a 2-line .gtkrc-2.0.

So looking around for GTK font side I found this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=846348

I inserted this snippet in .gtkrc-2.0 and solved my problems for palemoon, acrobat and openoffice at one time

Code: Select all

style "font"
{
font_name = "Helvetica Bold 12"
}
widget_class "*" style "font"
gtk-font-name = "Helvetica Bold 12"  

I still like an answer to my question 1, which I supplement with this

In PM Preferences->Content->Advanced is it advisable to set minimum font size to 18 ? (or any value not None)
This sets a nice default zoom for most sites, but I found that for instance my bank site (which is one of the sites which do not use the full screen width) gets confused, and even zooming down does not cure it. So I wonder if/how zoom can be remembered by site (not easy I guess, specially for sites visited in private browsing)

[trava90]

You could try NoSquint:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nosquint/

[Night Wing]

For question #1, I recommend the NoSquint extension.

I use it. It remembers a site's page, not just for the session, but all the time even if you turn off your computer and even if you remove it's cookie. When you go back to a site's page, it will be as you last left it viewing wise.

As an example. I'm fond of weather radar sites. For Wunderground, I have it set at 160% for viewing the site's radar pages since I sit 42" away from my desktop computer monitor's screen. For the Accuweather radar site pages, I have it set for 185% viewing. And for my MyWay home start site page, I have it set for 200%.

NoSquint will remember all these sites different viewing page percentages as long as you don't delete NoSquint's history which can be deleted in the Privacy tab in Options under "Clear your recent history".

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Had a try with nosquint ... I am not sure is what I need

I like the indicator of the current zoom in the status bar

On the other hand I have the impression it slows down things a bit, can I get hints about how to interpret the about:memory output or whether there is any other performance monitor ?

Also it has a funny way to define domains. For instance my own site/pages have URL in form host1.subdomain1.organization.country/~lucio while my institute pages are http://www.subdomain1.organization.country. What nosquint recorded was a zoom for organization.country/~lucio and another one (I was playing around for testing) for organization.country/ ... the result is that the latter zoom applies also to all other institutes of my organization !!! Apparently that can be cured introducing "exceptions" but I am not sure that introduces an extra load

Finally (since one of the offending sites was my bank which I browse in private browsing) it does not remember zoom for private browsing sites (unless one accesses once such domain in non private mode)

I am unsure of the exact way browsers (i.e. FF and PM) do page rendering for what fonts and zooming is concerned, which could help to make optimal tuning. I consider the following two alternatives.

1) no addon. In preferences->fonts&colors->advanced set largish font sizes, and a minimum size of 18. This looks to me fast, works for most sites, causes severe misalignment in my bank site (bad design ?) and occasional glitches in phpBB forums (the author and message columns are sometimes not columns but have different widths row to row). Whatever zoom I adjust for the 1-2 dozen tabs I keep regularly open is remembered across sessions (by session manager addon I suppose ... which of course means it does not apply to private browsing nor occasional visits)

2) with nosquint, In preferences->fonts&colors->advanced set largish font sizes, and a minimum size of none. In nosquint I set primary zoom to text only, and its zoom to 130% (larger for occasional sites, e.g. 140% for phpBB forums). I have the impression its a bit slow (but slower if full zoom for text and images is selected), but cures all the glitches.

[Night Wing]

I have no speed issues or loss of performance when using NoSquint. Many sites I visit where NoSquint is in use, the site comes up in about one half (where I've visited the site before) to two seconds at the most (if I've never visited that site) and this is on two, 5 year old desktop computers with each having lots of memory and fast processor speeds.

But, with my poor eyesight, I need NoSquint. So basically for me, when it comes down to "speed", the fastest speed to bring up sites time wise or when navigating those sites would not do me any good if I have trouble seeing the sites vision wise.