Bug description font is annoyingly large

[Colin Watson]

The font size used for the body text of bugs recently increased. It is now jarringly large and feels like reading a large-print book. If I were visually-impaired, I'd increase my font size myself; Launchpad should use something more reasonable. In particular, it is now noticeably bigger than the text used in portlets, which is off-putting.

Few non-trivial bugs fit on my screen as a whole. As a result, one of the things I value in the bug UI is the ability to see a reasonably substantial amount of text in one go so that I don't have to keep scrolling up and down. The new font size means that I generally have to hit Ctrl+- before I can do this. Please consider reverting this change.

[- (a--deactivatedaccount)]

I am not sure what font you are using, Arial or something is it?

Anyways mine is not as spaced out, but I agree with Colin that it is unusually large.

I was going through my Firefox view settings when on launchpad today (I did not know that there was an update)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I now see that this was requested in bug 82344. Sigh. I can only say that other sites designed for reading large quantities of text (e.g. news.bbc.co.uk, but I imagine most other news sites) have not taken the same IMO mistaken decision.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Denny: as far as I can recall I'm just using Firefox's defaults on Ubuntu Gutsy.

[Emmet Hikory (persia)]

Further, the increases to the Launchpad font size now make Launchpad not fit horizontally at 832x624 (and presumably also 800x600) resulutions with the default Ubuntu Firefox, which significantly degardes usability for those using these still common resolutions, as it generates an additional scrollbar, causing even less of the bug details to be visible on-screen.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Person pages with IRC nicks/servers come off particularly badly from this change. Look at https://launchpad.net/~sabdfl, for instance - the nick and server text is big and chunky and looks like it was written on a BBC Micro.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

The IRC nick bit looks that way because there is a manual style="font-size: 120%" attribute in the page.

As for the bug pages, the text is at the same size as the size as the proportional text (both the font height and the ex-height look about the same to me). Perhaps it'd be worth making monospace text slightly smaller than proportional text though -- I believe that's what Firefox's defaults do.

[Ralph Corderoy (ralph-inputplus)]

I wondered why Launchpad's main comment text has got too big and thick in the last couple of days. I'm viewing on a 17" CRT at 1280x1024. I don't think I've come across a site where I have to make the font size smaller before. It isn't just the size that's the problem, the increase in size has made the font too thick.

Why can't everything be based off the font size the user has selected in their browser preferences using percentages? Wouldn't that please all of the people all of the time?

[Ralph Corderoy (ralph-inputplus)]

I'm seeing the problem too, so confirming.

[Soul-Sing (soulzing)]

i dont see the problem at all! sorry.

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

I can confirm this.
On my 1680x1050 display with 128dpi, the fonts are horribly big (especially the monospaced ones).

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Fixed in RF 4740.

[Nicolas Valcarcel (nvalcarcel)]

i'm having the same problem on a Hardy Heron fresh install, maybe launchpad is using a font which isn't installed by default on hardy? i'm attaching a screenshot

[Nicolas Valcarcel (nvalcarcel)]

I'm reopening this bug since i'm experiencing it.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

FWIW I (the original reporter) haven't seen this for some time, although of course I may have different fonts installed.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Nicolas, the screenshot you posted is not of a bug report. And as far as I know, there have been no font changes in Launchpad in the past couple of months. Do you have the same problem in Ubuntu 7.10?

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

I still experience this bug as well on Ubuntu 7.10. Attached is a screenshot (of a bug).

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Okay. This is a side-effect of hard-coding the font size for Launchpad as a whole, to 10pt (13.3px at 96dpi), instead of leaving it as the default. We then override that to {font-family: monospace} for bug descriptions and comments, resulting in monospace 10pt, instead of whatever your default monospace size is, which is likely smaller than 10pt.

We could hard-code a smaller monospace size, but font preferences vary widely, so we could worsen things for more people than we improve them. I think the best solution here is to set Launchpad overall to use your default font size.

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

With the recent launchpad UI update this got significantly worse - now basically all the fonts are extremenly large.

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

Here is a new screenshot, illustrating the problems.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Nikolaus, the only thing in Launchpad that has changed its font size in the past two months is the location bar. From the screenshot, it appears that you have triggered Firefox's Zoom In command by mistake. If not, please report the problem as a separate bug, because this report is not about that. This report is specifically about the font size for bug descriptions.

[Steve Alexander (stevea)]

In Firefox, ctrl+0 (zero) resets the zoom level to normal.

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

But didn't the entirue Launchpad interface change recently? I can't believe that I haven't used launchpad for 2 months (because I the first time I saw the new UI was yesterday).

Anyway, I am at normal zoom level so I will open a new bug.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Fixed in mainline, r6916. Bug descriptions and comments now use your preferred monospace font size, as set in your browser preferences.