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.

[Hotaru_Lind]

Please, revert back or adjust the intitial text to maybe 60% of current size. At 60% of the text would be easily readable but not have just 27-28 lines of text (including spacing for paragraphs).
I'm on a 15" laptop monitor at 1080p and I have to zoom out at least 50% to comfortably read, 40% zoom gets me to what I'm used to on the Plaza.
I get trying new things and making improvements but this is painful for me to try and read at current scaling without zooming out to reduce font size.

[Xelz]

In my opinion needing to zoom to 50% or less to comfortably read on a desktop is not a good solution. Not when there already exists better ways of handling different screen-sizes in CSS.
I even tested on my tablet the text there is also way too large, and it doesn't have the same level of un-zooming ability a desktop client has. There I can only make text bigger (at least not without affecting every website and by digging far into menus), but not smaller.

[teanndaorsa]

I'm surprised that folks are finding it uncomfortable to read, but thanks for the feedback and I'll take it into account. Knowing that tablets don't easily allow shrinking is definitely a definite downside to this.

Everything I've read on usability and typography suggests that that smaller text is less comfortable and more difficult to read. Making it larger might mean you have to scroll more, but it shouldn't make it less comfortable, unless scrolling comfort is what you mean?

[teanndaorsa]

With your comments in mind, I've tweaked the size when the window is at full scale down to 18em instead of 24 (so 150% of the size the rest of the Plaza is at instead of 200%). It might still show at the larger size unless you refresh the page.