[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:gbcm76$484$1 at digitalmars.com...
> "BCS" <ao at pathlink.com> wrote in message
>>
>> PDF does zoom better than HTML. With web pages, you as often as not get 
>> the tiny font wrapped to 1/2 the width of the screen or lines that are 
>> about a paragraph wide. With PDF you can zoom in without things going 
>> woonky.
>>
>
> I'd argue that's a browser issue. IE7 operates on the idea that zooming 
> and layout should be completely independent, so it doesn't have that 
> problem (Although I primarily use Firefox - I can't use the web without my 
> favorite extensions :) ). Firefox (and probably other browsers) doesn't 
> really have a true zoom. It just adjusts the text size (sometimes - it 
> depends on the CSS), which is what screws up certain poorly-designed 
> layouts. (Well-designed layouts also avoid that problem, even on Firefox.)

Also, small font sizes in HTML at the very least tend to still be fairly 
crisp (except maybe in Safari, but that's a different issue, and a whole 
separate rant). In PDF, if something's too small to read it's generally 
because it's in a reasonably-sized font that's been scaled down. Problem is, 
that scaling-down degrades the quality (Since the scaling algorithm is 
chosen for print accuracy rather than readability). Look at a small font, 
maybe 8 or 10pt, on a web page, and compare that to a PDF, say, from a book, 
that's been zoomed out so that the text is exactly the same *physical* size 
as the text on the web page. The text in the PDF will be a lot harder to 
read.