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Width of "Standard" should change based on font size
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Description

Right now the main content column size in "Standard" width remains the same even when "Text" is adjusted up from its previous size. This causes a lot of scrunching/dense text. (All screenshots taken at same resolution.)

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(Particularly the large version is really rough, but I can't say I appreciate the standard version all that much here.)

I think the standard width should increase at each setting such that the count of words per line remains approximately the same when font size is scaled. This would help generally ensure a more graceful design at least within the skin for our various block structures/templates.

Event Timeline

Thanks for submitting this @Izno. You're right. The larger type sizes break the layout of the homepage. Our strategy so far is to find instances like this where the new font sizes make typography less readable and address them one-by-one. For example, I've been thinking about this issue in the context of the Citations sections. The characters-per-line gets too low in some of these items, and it breaks the typography.

Screenshot 2024-01-10 at 9.55.38 AM.png (1×3 px, 617 KB)

One solution I considered is to make the Citations one column when the font-size is large.

In the case of the homepage above, the images in the " In the news" and "Featured" sections make the effect much worse, so thanks for raising it. There are a few approaches we could take:

  • Make the whole page wider everywhere, as you suggest.
    • The downside of this approach is that we don't want articles to increase in width as the font-size increases. The lower character-per-line count on those pages actually makes them more readable. this could be the case on other types of pages, as well.
  • Make one-off tweaks to page width as issues arise.
    • The downside of this is that switching page widths while navigating is a jarring transition that feels "broken"
  • Make targeted layout changes as issues arise. Keep the width the same everywhere and treat each instance as a bug report, essentially. The Citations example above shows this approach. This is my preferred approach for now until something arises where more universal changes make sense.

So for now, I'd like to explore tweaking the layout of the home page when the font sizes are bigger. I'll send an update when I've completed that.

We've split this into two tickets (currently marked as subtasks of this ticket). The first will look at current issues specifically with the main page. The second will look into whether width should increase along with text size throughout the interface. Closing this ticket for now. cc @Izno