Story styling experiment (trial on latexstories.net)

[teanndaorsa]

Okay folks, I am trialing a new stylesheet for story pages, on all the stories on latexstories.net, and I am interested in people's experience of and opinions on the new styling.

Initially at least, the goal is to move away from the fixed-size fonts the stories currently use, which leads to dense, small text on desktop browsers and tablet devices. Instead, the size of the typeface will scale as the browser viewport increases, so that the amount of text on display without scrolling is roughly the same, no matter what size device you are viewing the story on. The net effect of this is that on larger, higher resolution devices, the text will not be tiny and should not require zooming to read, but on smaller device screens, the text will remain roughly the size it is now.

This is something that keeps coming up in the usability analysis for the site, and my hope is that the new stylesheet should be more comfortable for people to read. Obviously it's always been possible to 'zoom' using the browser functionality that scales text and visual elements up in size, and that is still possible. The difference should be that if you want to go back to the text size that the pages used to be at, you zoom out to 50%. What I'm hoping is that more people are comfortable with the new text scale than are uncomfortable.

I must confess that when I'm reading stories on the Plaza I tend to use a desktop browser, or a tablet, so I am especially keen to hear the perspectives of anyone who habitually reads on a phone-sized device. From my experimentation, it feels like your experience should not change that much, the change is more pronounced on larger devices.

I will probably trial this just on latexstories.net for a couple of weeks to gather feedback, and then make a decision whether or not to roll it out to the Plaza in general, undo the change, or try something else.