Typophile

Why never to specify 'Small Fonts' in style sheets

codeman38

Heh. I was just browsing the link that Paul Davidson posted in this post several weeks back, and noticed something really strange: some of the links were illegible at my default font size.

mania? pashino? draigon?

Why? It seems the designers of the site in question decided that the navigation bar should be set in the Windows bitmap font known as "Small Fonts". There was no "Small Fonts" bitmap at my default font size, so Windows simply took the smallest size and scaled it appropriately!

Interestingly enough, the problem was fixed by

codeman38

On a completely different note, related to the original archived posting: the accent mark in this French logo is just wrong.

Hrant H Papazian

> if you had let me upload images as PNGs rather than GIFs, it would've saved about 9000 bytes per image...

Are you sure? I don't think I've never such a thing happen.

hhp

Hrant H Papazian

What SW are you using?
With PhotoShop7 I loaded up your second image and simply re-output it (in GIF with the same palette and everything), and it went down from 9,994 bytes to 731.

hhp

codeman38

Seriously. Using ImageMagick, at the highest compression setting, the size difference between GIF and PNG on these particular screen shots is about 9kb each.

I've attached the PNG versions as proof:


image/pngPNG #1: 413 bytes
small100.png (0.4 k)



image/pngPNG #2: 597 bytes
small90.png (0.6 k)

codeman38

Ah, here's what the problem is: ImageMagick (an open-source program) doesn't support GIF89 compression due to patent licensing issues. Free software and GIFs don't mix. :-)

(Oh, and before someone goes and shouts "buy some real graphics software", I have Corel PhotoPaint 10 on this system, and could've used that, but ImageMagick is more convenient for batch conversions, especially when your screen shot tool saves to a non-GIF format by default. Ah well. I'll remember this next time!)

Hrant H Papazian

> at the highest compression setting

BTW, is it still lossless?

Anyway, your second image seems to be 597 bytes, so it's comparable to what I got - but [obviously] PNG is not as well supported... GIF roolz, baby. Except if you need a lossless 8-bit alpha channel - a very rare requirement.

hhp

Hrant H Papazian

Hey, there's a serious bug in this system!!

The emailed versions of posts are sometimes incomplete! Like in Cody's previous message, the second part (in parentheses) was totally missing...

hhp

codeman38

Actually, that's not a bug. I just revised the post with parenthetical commentary; it wasn't originally there when I first posted. ;)

Hrant H Papazian

> I just revised the post

Oh.
But then we really need to get any revisions (and preferably deletion notifications too) by email. Otherwise I can trick somebody (who only checks the email versions - like I usually do now) by pretending to reply in one way but actually in the end replying in another.

Just like this, you filthy anonymous parasite!! ;-)

hhp

Hrant H Papazian

No, about 9K.

hhp

Joe Pemberton

9000 bytes? You mean almost a whole Kilobyte?

=)

Captured from web.archive.org on 10 Oct 2013. view this capture