Changes to our IM formatting

Luke Schierer lschiere at pidgin.im
Tue Aug 4 17:31:53 EDT 2009


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On Aug 4, 2009, at 13:04 EDT, Mark Doliner wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:56 AM, Luke Schierer<lschiere at pidgin.im>  
> wrote:
>> On Aug 4, 2009, at 04:40 EDT, Mark Doliner wrote:
>>> I've kind of noticed that IM protocols tend to use "pt" sizes when
>>> specifying the font size.  E.g. 10pt or 14pt.  But AIM and maybe a  
>>> few
>>> places in libpurple and Pidgin have historically used HTML font  
>>> sizes
>>> (the ones on the crappy 1 to 7 scale).  I think this sometimes leads
>>> to a scenario where, if you send a message to yourself for  
>>> example, we
>>> convert the font size from the 1-7 scale to the pt scale then back  
>>> to
>>> the 1-7 scale, which has the potential to lose precision.
>>>
>>> But also it's just kind of silly.  It doesn't seem like the 1-7  
>>> scale
>>> is really used anywhere else, and the font tag is deprecated in  
>>> newer
>>> versions of HTML.  I suspect that AIM is capable of dealing with pt
>>> sizes now, too.
>>
>> I could be wrong here, but I think we *did* send point sizes at one  
>> time,
>> and I think people complained because windows tends to use a very  
>> different
>> default font size than your average linux computer, and it tended  
>> to lead to
>> us sending ridiculously big/small text to the winaim user compared  
>> to what
>> they normally saw.  Still, its certainly worth testing my  
>> recollection.
>
> Hmm, I don't remember that.  It seems like that reasoning might be
> flawed, though.  Converting from one system to the other doesn't make
> the font size behave differently for Windows vs. Linux.  If an HTML
> font size 4 appears bigger in Windows AIM than it does in Linux Pidgin
> then a 14pt font will also appear bigger in Windows AIM than it does
> in Linux.
>
> -Mark
>

Right.  But if the font you normally type in, menus appear in, desktop  
icons show up in, so on is 10 on your linux box and 12 on your windows  
box (or vice versa), you'll notice quite a size difference when you've  
set your linux font preferences up and start sending mesages.

Luke


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