Make only Text larger

Make only Text larger

When I want to make a page easier to read I almost never want to make 'everything' bigger as Opera does now. I just want the font size to be bigger. In any case, I've always seen Opera's 'bigger' functionality as a bit dodgy (often setting 110% will screw the font spacing and I have to refresh) and it never looks quite right.

So I wish that there would be an "Increase Font Size feature".

I've heard some people say the Opera's 'make everything larger' is an advantage over Firefox, but not to me it isn't ;-)

++ I asked for this a long time ago and even had a mini-argument with Hakon over it, but even he didn't seem to understand that I and many others wanted an option to increase the text size _easily_ without going through a dialog and without pixellating the images, which are sometimes OK when the text is too small.

robot tourist are you refering to this thread which is the only thread that I found concerning fonts where you have been involved. Most certainly you can not mean to imply that the below is even close to being a argument of any kind.

Originally posted by robot_tourist:

++, but I suggest having the default minimum, then other type-faces can be opted out. Opera's CTO should like that (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/11/hakon_on_ms_interroperability/ - see 'Verdana sucks'). But hopefully, the next Windows user interface should fix all this nonsense about different type-faces being larger or smaller at the same point size.

ThePast, I used The Register's email the author link and Hakon actually replied unlike many other time's I've mailed the author (maybe because I used my operamail address) and we exchanged a couple of emails after that. My apologies if my recollection of other events is hazy, but I definitely did exchange emails with hakon on the issue. He told me to just press the '+' key. But sometimes I don't want the pictures to scale (unless they are vector-type, scalable ones)

Thanks for the clarification.

Originally posted by robot_tourist:

Hakon actually replied unlike many other time's I've mailed the author

The Norwegians are a friendly crowd. Not as smart as us Swedes of course, but friendly.

*looks around for any Norwegians in the thread*

Pheeew... none that I can see

+1

Originally posted by haavard:

Why can't you just increase the minimum font size?

Though written few times:

- not all text on a web page needs to be 14px big - only the article I read, not the menu and foot and so on
- when using Opera for webdesign testing, you can't afford to have set any minimum font (because, unfortunatelly, it is sometimes needed to use small fonts)

btw: this function isn't a big problem, is it?

I'm not saying the current zooming function is bad. FF zooming is a bad joke compared to it. No, it's quite cool - I use it for images often, but zooming from 9px font to for-me-readable 14 or 15px gives me somehow messed page content. It works, but only-text-zooming would be brilliant. This I meant would be an extra function.

Mybe as a sufficient solution would be another mode in among others like 'Emulate text browser' and 'High contrast - B&W' - another would be a mix of Hight contrast and bigger font - preserving the page layout

most stupid idea, i think root of idea from stupid FF zooming...
want only text? it`s easy without make Opera code size like godzilla.. sorry, mozilla..)
one simple userjs (i can do it in 10 minutes for everyone who want it, if they can pay 1$ (o, good idea, www.onemillionfromwhowantstupidzooming.com ;-) and you can zoom only text and get everything unreadeble (i meat every image menu, design, and so on)...

From a user's point of view ...

Originally posted by Spurry:

So I wish that there would be an "Increase Font Size feature".

+1
Yes that would be nice indeed.

Applying font size to site specific preferences would be even more nice to have/ use.

Originally posted by Spurry:

Applying font size to site specific preferences would be even more nice to have/ use.

+1

While separate from the issue of text zoom, when using large zoom I do so in combination with View > Fit to window width and there will be no horizontal scrolling.

+1

Yes Please, my eyes ain't geting any better, I endup upping the font a lot these days. Very Basic but very useful.

Sometimes the page zooms in when I press a certain key by accident, and I can't find the key to make it zoom back to normal.

However, I still like Opera's zoom feature, unlike Firefox's, which only zooms text. The option suggested above should exist, though, and I will suggest on the Firefox forums that they allow an option to zoom everything.

+1

Originally posted by Sigup:

Originally posted by QRDeNameland:

I had to run the uninstaller twice and still had to manually remove files, more "perfection"

Yet again you fail to understand basic things. Most programs do this. The uninstaller isn't supposed to delete user created data.

So pat yourself on the back....YOU WON!!!!

Of course I did. I completely destroyed your arguments.

sigup, you are a complete idiot. this is the WISH LIST and more than 20 people have this wish. accept your defeat - you cant make them change their mind because YOU do not have arguments.

and if you are representative folr the Opera community then it sux bad.

Originally posted by reb'l:

sigup, you are a complete idiot

I fear, this means too much honor for
Imagine, being COMPLETE in whatsoever...!
Many people are struggling their whole life to acquire some sort of completeness and never reach it...

He's not a complete idiot - some parts of him are missing.

Originally posted by reb'l:

sigup, you are a complete idiot.

No namecalling or personal attacks on these forums, ever. This is a warning.

Yes, I would wished that sigup had the basic social skill of actually participating in a dialog instead of viewing it as a game to win or lose. The tragedy is that if he hadn't so thoroughly annoyed everyone people could have seen that the actual advice he comes with is usually good.

Originally posted by Ace Jack Neo:

Sometimes the page zooms in when I press a certain key by accident, and I can't find the key to make it zoom back to normal.

The "6" key sets zoom to back to 100%.

Originally posted by jax:

Originally posted by Ace Jack Neo:

Sometimes the page zooms in when I press a certain key by accident, and I can't find the key to make it zoom back to normal.

The "6" key sets zoom to back to 100%.

The fact is that ordinary users don't know this and have difficulty finding out. Especially now that the zoom box is not part of the default user interface anymore, there is a dangerous discrepancy between the ease with which you can zoom in and out and the difficulty of reconstructing what happened and where to look to correct this.

Originally posted by jax:

The tragedy is...

I don't find that being a 'tragedy', it's more a RELIEF to me...
It was NO FUN to have to read those tirades...
and I wonder why they have been left so relatively little rebuked for so long...

Originally posted by jax:

...basic social skill...

That's the point! The absence of basic social skills is mostly what makes people look and being counted as idiots by others.

Originally posted by jax:

...the actual advice he comes with is usually good

And then his actual advice can be as good as it will, it's good for nothing any more! Alas.

Originally posted by HaJotKE:

It was NO FUN to have to read those tirades...

That may be, but let's get back on topic.

Originally posted by F_V:

The fact is that ordinary users don't know this and have difficulty finding out. Especially now that the zoom box is not part of the default user interface anymore, there is a dangerous discrepancy between the ease with which you can zoom in and out and the difficulty of reconstructing what happened and where to look to correct this.

I agree this has become a problem that we will have to solve.

+1

zooming bitmap images is ugly

-1
I can see a lot of people are getting a little overheated over this debate, but I'm going to throw in my opinion anyway.

I've always loved Opera's implementation of the zoom feature. To me it makes far more sense than any other.
My vision is often strained by viewing pages that not only have small text, but also have small images. Web pages are about far more than just text content, there are graphics and carefully laid out design and more. In my experience Opera offers the best way of presenting pages without breaking them.

Those of us with visual difficulties will always have to use scroll bars to get the most out of a page, but just increasing the font size *usually* results in overlapping elements that are difficult to get any appreciation of.

I also love the ease with which I can zoom in and out. No need to muck around with Ctrl keys. If you mistakenly hit + or -, you can just as easily deliberately hit * to fix it.

I'm not keen on having two zoom methods. I think it would cause confusion for users who just won't understand the difference.

There's nothing wrong with the zoom feature, we just want a text enlargement feature too. People can choose either. Its a feature I've used many times in IE.

Opera has many cool features, but some appear very hard to find. Like the . for Find-As-You-Type and pressing 6 to return the zoom to normal. I'd never have guessed the keys if you hadn't told me! Perhaps Opera could make the features easier to find?

Originally posted by Ace Jack Neo:

Opera has many cool features, but some appear very hard to find. Like the . for Find-As-You-Type and pressing 6 to return the zoom to normal. I'd never have guessed the keys if you hadn't told me! Perhaps Opera could make the features easier to find?

Do you have any suggestions for that?

In older Opera versions (7.2 or so), lots of features were extremely easy to find because they were all over the place. Toolbars, panels, dozens of buttons and text fields in the default user interface, so much that you hardly had any space left for actual browsing...

The only way zoom could be easier to find is to put a zoom box in the default UI, but Opera had very good reasons to abandon that in the first place. And find-as-you-type, being a keyboard-only power feature, is almost impossible to explain and indicate in the user interface.

Just put the zoom in the right click menu, and put a prompt that tells the user how to set the zoom level to normal in the event that they zoom a page.

Originally posted by shadow skill:

Just put the zoom in the right click menu, and put a prompt that tells the user how to set the zoom level to normal in the event that they zoom a page.

that menu is already sooooo crowded!

+1 for just text zooming, though. Sometimes you don't want the images and/or layout to grow.

I forgot +1 for just zooming text, zooming the entire page is just ridiculous when all you need or want to do is make the text on the page a bit bigger. On some of the sites I have frequented scaling the whole page is just plain silly since it throws all the images out of wack in order to get "bigger" text. Aside from that it is already possible to get firefox to only scale images.

The right click menu wouldn't be crowded because the things related to the page zoom would only appear when someone has changed the zoom level. Or you could make the zoom options a sub menu. In all honesty I think that the context menu should be configureable because I find many of the entries typically in it to be useless but that is just me.

Originally posted by shadow skill:

In all honesty I think that the context menu should be configureable

But this is already possible, ALL menus in OPERA can be changed by users.

Tools: Preferences > Advanced > Toolbars -> 'Menu setup' for a choice of different menu files, which you could create yourself...

The only thing missing is however some comfortable editing possibility during operation of OPERA, which is NOT so difficult to implement, I believe.

You only have to duplicate the menu file you want to change, than edit it within an external editor (or even better the internal editor which is available now) to your will, save it and in a last step chose it as current. Voilà!

All which is missing, is an "Edit" button, which only works when some inactive menu entry is chosen from the list, otherwise it should be greyed out in order to NOT allow editing the currently active menu.
Some additional help in this editor for menus (same thing for toolbars) would be appreciated however, such as syntax help informations, an allowed action collection or even checking features, but that's another story...

Originally posted by HaJotKE:

The only thing missing is however some comfortable editing possibility during operation of OPERA, which is NOT so difficult to implement, I believe.

Exactly, I was thinking the same thing. Its far too technical for the average user. So you can forget about people who prefer to use IE.

I can't edit the right click context menu from the advanced menu for opera, which makes sense considering the fact that the right click menu is not a toolbar. I'd rather avoid hacking ini files to pull this sort of thing off.

Originally posted by haavard:

Why can't you just increase the minimum font size?

Because that sets minimum font size someone is able to read, and that's different than font size that is comfortable to read. If it was set to 16-18 pixels, on most pages it would make all fonts same size, and that causes loss of information conveyed by font size.

Having separate zoom and font zoom functions can be confusing and would allow extremes like tiny font + huge images.

So my suggestion is: make 90%, 110% and 120% zoom only zoom font size. Graphics scaled by such small factor look distorted and/or blurry anyway.

10-20% shift in font size won't break many layouts, so zoom would remain "bulletproof".

+1 for testing/developers

I like the zoom all feature, but zooming just text would be great too.

Oh yes, please +1

IMHO zooming all like text, images and such is rather a hindrance than a strength occasionally, e.g. like on these forum default font size seems a bit to small here (1400x1050) ... personally methinks text is prior above else things -- it is the most important content for me ...

Originally posted by HaJotKE:

It was NO FUN to have to read those tirades...and I wonder why they have been left so relatively little rebuked for so long...

Well -- long standing rumors are saying this is due to some weird submarines strategy -- those rumors never have been rejected ...
We might live with them

+1
How about using the scroll button (when placed on the glasses button) to zoom in and out?

"+1" (That means I'm voting for this feature I take it.)

I agree that the lack of normal text resizing controls is a major flaw. Keep both types, and include buttons to size the text up or down one size.

BTW: Firefox is getting pretty cool text-zoom feature - it will automatially adapt text zoom, so that *most of the text* on page has preferred size (keeps relative font sizes, doesn't make anything huge).

Originally posted by F_V:

Originally posted by haavard:
Why can't you just increase the minimum font size?
Because a larger minimum font size increases *all* small text, even small captions or unimportant parts of text, the smallness of which you're willing to accept given the mess increasing the fonts sometimes produces on a web page design

However, a "minimum font size" in Opera 9's site preferences would go a long way to solving the problem for me. There are several sites (such as NYT) where I need to use a higher minimum font size, but then it's too high for other sites if set globally. I'd love to be able to simply go into the preferences for a given site and up it accordingly.

+1

Add on-the-fly text size adjustment (and keep on-the-fly page zoom of course!). (FYI: IE7 has both.)

+1

Zoom for the browser menu:

• entire page
• only text (& in the "site preferences")
• only images (optional)

Zoom for the mouse menu (to focus on one image).

+1

And for the text size -- let it cascade to line-height; if you are overriding the text size to a readably large font, you probably also want the line height to change, instead of writing on top of the previous line.

+1

+1 as an addition to current behaviour

+1, I want text zoom too!

Originally posted by shoust:

I have increase font-size and decrease font-size bookmarklets on my site.. .although it doesnt save its setting.. you can adjust when necessary (on big pages it takes a while to zoom text)http://opera.oslocity.org/shoust/?p=jslets

Cool, is it possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to those?
Also they don't have any nice icons on the toolbar, just the standard bookmark icon.

Originally posted by svivian:

Cool, is it possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to those?

Try: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=1962465

Originally posted by svivian:

Cool, is it possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to those?

Yeah, copy the link address, then paste as follows (<paste> means where to paste the text. Replace the <paste> with the link address)

Go to page,"<paste>"

Then copy that and assign that command to a keyboard shortcut or gesture.