Hi,
I’m new here and I have a couple of immediate reactions essentially related to design issues.
It would be good to be able to search the forums. I might be starting a thread that already exists because I didn’t feel like trawling through all the threads manually.
Secondly font size.
The roman font is fine but as a learner I find the Japanese font hard to read in vocab lists, drop down menus etc. (Generally it’s fine within the articles in the WorkDesk.) Mainly in terms of size but also in terms of typeface. I can zoom the text in the browser but then the site design gets quite garbled on the screen as the English elements reflow.
It’d be nice to address this using style sheets. Indeed it could be an issue for a lot of learners especially if dealing with an unfamiliar writing system.
As a user it would be nice to keep my native language as it is but increase the size/change the font on my target language.
I’d just like to second Belton’s suggestion about font size. I find the small-size Cyrillic in the forum difficult to read sometimes, especially with longer texts.
All in all, I’ve been a regular user for about 6 weeks - and you’re doing a fantastic job with the site.
Mark
One of my students was telling me today that she was having trouble reading lingq due to the font size. While small yes, I told her to just press [ ctrl ] + [+] to increase the size in her browser. That is what i do all the time to solve this problem
But I too find it a little small in places here and there. But I think it is my browser more than anything. I am using the Apple Safari for Windows browser to view lingq, because it tends to be easier on my eyes than Firefox.
The font sizes are an issue but apparently it’s not that simple a thing to fix. Apparently it is not as simple as just increasing the font size since the current font size is fine on smaller screen resolutions. We will need to implement relative fonts instead.We will be dealing with this issue but it will probably have to wait until we finish the latest things we are working on. For now you will have to rely on ctrl +.
(because full texts are emailed I haven’t been back to the forum since. sorry! )
I’ve also noticed that browser choice has an effect.
In OmniWeb on the Mac I can display the Japanese in a san-serif face which is easier to read at small sizes. (however I can’t get the javascript for linkqs to work) But in Firefox I can’t get it to display san-serif instead of a serif face. I think what’s happening is Firefox finds helvetica but not the Japanese glyphs so it substitutes a serifed typeface.
A bit extreme but I also found I could define the fonts to use in Firefox’s preferences if I also over-ride lingq’s style sheet.
Belton, it sounds like you have things all worked out! At any rate, we did increase the font size on the site a few days ago so that should help things as well.