User:Hurdsean/june2004



Recently (June 2004) I was disappointed to see that the new default skin of Wikipedia gets in the way of easy reading, by adding distracting features to it, and scaling down the font-size. With regard to the latter: it is of course possible to correct the font-size manually, but to do so for every page one browses to is unpleasent. Having a user account I was able to change back to the standard skin (which has the additional "printable version" option of creating a entirely uncluttered page, with explicit quoted links, for printing or archiving), but occasional readers won't be aware (or care for) the option of creating an account to change their references. And to keep the standard skin one needs to create accounts for all the different parts of Wikipedia (other languages, meta).

When I followed a link to a page on http://meta.wikipedia.org and my wiki prefs failed, I saw the new skin again in my default browser, and this time I took screenshots. It took me at least 5 minutes to create a new account and change the look to standard, even though I knew where to go.

Jul 11 2004 After installing Firefox 0.9.1 with gtk2 xft true type support I noticed two things: (1) default a sans-serif font came up (2) the combination of a sans-serif font and true type font prevented the smaller font-size to become difficult to read. I do not know why my default browser (Mozilla 1.7) uses a serif font on the same page (which is quite ugly sized down). Since most users seem to use TTF, this may explain why few see a problem with the forced font-size. However, I still prefer a normal sized Times font. Also, the gtk2 xft ttf browsers for my system all have crappy support for Japanese and Chinese (to the extent that text is not only difficult to read, but often impossible to read). Therefore I will continue to use Mozilla with the regular fonts for the X Window System. Those fonts may not have the unlimited scaleability of TTF, but at are quite crisp and clean with normal sizes in all languages for which I have got fonts, including Japanese and Chinese.