How to prevent mobile devices to scale font size - html

On our website we have the following phenomenon: When rendering the website on a desktop browser (Firefox, IE, Chrome), all fonts, in particular those embedded in <td> tags, are rendered in the same size.
However, when rendering the website on a mobile device, the font size of the texts within the <td> tags shrinks. See below. We tried to set
html {
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
}
but this only helps with the problem on the mobile safari and opera browser. Using the tips from this website, we added
#media (max-width: 960px) {
td {
font-size: 20pt;
}
}
to the css, but this now miraculously only works for one of our phones held tilted sideways, not in portrait.
How do we prevent the font-size within the table cells to be scaled down?

What Olli and JStephen said, but I also had to add text-size-adjust: none;
html,body {
text-size-adjust: none;
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
-moz-text-size-adjust: none;
-ms-text-size-adjust: none;
}

You were most likely looking for this:
Include the following <meta> tag in the document's <head> section:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
It helped me with the same problem.

Maybe if you also add body to the css like this:
html,body { -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; }
Resource: iPhone/iPod - prevent font-size-changing

I know this is an old post, but I came across it and found the answer that worked for me is just an extension to Olli's. There are more css styles you have to add to support other browsers:
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
-moz-text-size-adjust: none;
-ms-text-size-adjust: none;
I had originally put everything in table cells which worked on my nexus, but my samsung phone was still randomly deciding which text to scale and which to keep the set size. I set 13px to everything on the page and it was the only font size styling I did. This was the only way I was able to fix it on all the devices I have.

First of all, font-size should be set relative to a default-value that is defined by the html selector, in case of repsonsive formatting.
For example:
html {
font-size: 100%;
}
h1 {
font-size: 2em;
}
td {
font-size: 1.25em;
}
The reason for this is that different platforms use different default values for 100%. E.g. desktops use 16px but mobile browsers often use 24px.
If you define the font-size of one of your elements to an absolute value, it will not scale with the rest of the items that have been assigned no value or a relative value; thus resulting in this behaviour.
The best solution to this problem: use relative font-sizes with em, rem or even % as the unit, istead of the absolute font-sizes with pt or px as the unit.
Edit for more background on the different default font-size on different platforms:
Because each platform has its own use-case, its own average screen size, average reader-to-screen distance, average DPI-value for its screen and (most important of all) a different viewport width, font-sizes aren't equally legible on each of those platforms if set to a fixed size. That's why the browsers define the default size to something different, as to optimise the experience for the user on that specific platform.
Sure, you could ignore this and keep setting all your font-sizes to something fixed, but that's going against the flow and breaking the user experience. Instead, try to make peace with this fact and be sure that it all scales properly.
Edit2: To warn you about the usage of em vs rem: using em will inherit the parent value and multiply it by the value of the font-size you define in your current element, while using rem will always be based on the value that is set in the root element instead of the parent element. So the following code will result in the following absolute values:
HTML:
<html>
<...>
<body>
<div>
<p>..</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
CSS:
html {
font-size: 100%; /* we agree on 16px for this example */
}
div {
font-size: 1.25em; /* add a quarter of 16, so 20px is the actual value */
}
p {
font-size: 0.8em; /* subtract a fifth of the value of the parent element: 20 * 0.8 = 16 again */
font-size: 0.8rem; /* subtract a fifth of the value of the root element: 16 * 0.8 = 13.8 (will be rounded by browser to 14) pixels */
}

Related

how to fix relativeness of `em` scale in css?

since em length scale is relative to the current font size, this problem arose.
I want the border-width of many elements to be one eighth of my normal font width. By normal I mean when the html document has the least necessary parts and just a text written in my font. My font is mono.
You can see how it looks:
When I just write border-width: 0.125em;, borders will not have the same width.
I don't want to use px because I want to produce the same width on very compact displays.
What should I do?
You can use calc(1rem / 8) to get 1/8th of 1rem or use 0.125rem. Using rem will reference the document's base font size instead of whatever em is throughout the document.
div {
font-family: monospace;
border: 0.125rem solid black;
}
<div>foo</div>

Different line-height and baseline on mobile and desktops

This is the third time I have faced this problem.
I don't know what is wrong.
Here are two pictures of how it looks like:
On desktops:
On mobile devices:
As you can see on mobile devices text is not aligned center vertically.
Again this problem is only visible on mobile devices.
What is the problem? What did I miss? This problem is also visible in inputs.
I am using the following code for the buttons:
.button
font-family: 'Gotham Pro', sans-serif
font-size: 14px
color: $color-text--button
padding: 10px 15px
text-transform: uppercase
background: $color-button--default
border: 1px solid $color-transparent
Please note, I use padding for setting height of buttons
UPDATE
I have just tested in mobile android Firefox browser, everything works just fine the issue only with Chrome
There is no line-height specified in your code.
Try setting a specific line-height. In addition I suggest, that you center your text via line-height and not via padding. Set a line-height with the same height the button has.
CSS
.button {
height: 40px;
line-height: 40px;
}
This works of course only for single line texts.
Also have a look at this SO question
Did you specify a media query SPECIFICALLY for mobile?
You may need to add
// you can use any other value of screen width mobiles use like 640, 768
#media (max-width:480px){
line-height: 15px; // The line height you want to show on mobile
}
Not all browsers have a default. Almost always I make a habit of setting styles on the body element
body{
font-size: 100%;
line-height: 1.333%;
}
to take care of things like this.
I had to work with a fancy font today and I noticed that it has different line-height rendering on chrome mobile device and chrome desktop mobile emulator (devtools). Which is apparently a bug to be reported for either dekstop either mobile chrome. Changing line-heights is the option to fix but cumbersome if you have many elements. After some digging I figured out this properties
ascent-override: 92%; /* play with values */
descent-override: 10%; /* one might not be needed */
Futhermore as I needed font change for mobile chrome only I tried media query and it worked.
#media (max-width: 1000px) {
#font-face{
font-family:'FancyFont';
src:url('fonts/FancyFont.ttf');
font-weight:400;
ascent-override: 92%;
}
}

Chrome font size loads large and then reduces

I'm using em units in my site's CSS. When I load a page of the site in Chrome, all the text will load in a very large font size. If I resize the browser window or load the developer console, the font size will then revert back to the 'correct' size. Sometimes if I flick through pages on the site, it will do the same or behave erratically (starting off large, sometimes starting off normal size).
I cannot replicate this in Safari or Firefox, so thinking it must be an issue in the way Chrome is interpreting my CSS or my em units.
Any ideas on why this is happening? If I remove all the em units and use px then it works fine (which perhaps is a solution but doesn't help me understand em).
(Using: Chrome 32, Macbook Air, OS 10.8.5, a custom Wordpress theme).
Some CSS:
body {
margin: 0 auto;
color: #404040;
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 1.6rem;
line-height: 1.5;
padding: 1em; }
(if I use font-size:16px here it will work fine, but then what's the point of em / rem)
I had the same problem as you actually. I recently started using rem instead of em and it is much better since you don't have to worry about nested elements, such as list items, multiplying the value. However, I noticed that the font was loading too large and then resizing.
In my CSS, I originally had reset the font using this:
html {
font-size: 62.5%;
}
You're probably already aware why, but this just means that 1em would equal 10px. I then had font-size: 1.4rem in the body to set the base font size to 14px.
To fix the issue you mentioned:
Try setting your html font-size to 10px, not a percentage value, and then use rem from then on. Seems to be working for me anyway.
CSS3 introduces a few new units, including the rem unit, which stands
for "root em".
The em unit is relative to the font-size of the parent, which causes
the compounding issue. The rem unit is relative to the root—or the
html—element. That means that we can define a single font size on the
html element and define all rem units to be a percentage of that.
You can try font-size: 1.6em; /* EM not REM */ but anyway it might not works as far as 1em is equal to the current font size.
You might use px instead or set px in body and use em after.
Needs more info. A live URL would be appreciated.
Can not reproduce using just this code:
body {
margin: 0 auto;
color: #404040;
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 1.6rem;
line-height: 1.5;
padding: 1em; }
http://jsfiddle.net/wZD4n/

Font size inconsistancy between browsers on mac

In the following example, it's a navigation bar. Its elements are variable in width, the sum of their width is the width of their container, ul element.
The issue is, each element has the same width on all windows browsers, the sum of their width is 379px. But on mac each browser seems to render the font slightly different, causing the width to either increase or decrease, thus the last element wrap to the second line.
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {margin:0;padding: 0;}
ul {margin:0;padding:0;list-style-type: none;}
.nav {
width:379px;
}
.nav li {
float: left;
margin: 5px;
padding: 20px;
background-color: #0099ff;
color: white;
font-family: Arial;
font-size: 16px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<ul class="nav">
<li>asdf</li>
<li>qwer</li>
<li>test 1</li>
<li>testing test</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
The question is, how to guarantee each element's width on all browsers by just specifying the font size.
Setting a fixed-width div plus padding size is tricky when working with text. It's unlikely you'll be able to get a string to render exactly the same size on all major browsers and platforms. Though you can get pretty close; here are some suggestions.
Specify px values rather than pt or em. Such text will render at the same size regardless of device resolution, and will still scale properly when zooming in and out
Use a very common font, or a web font. You can use Font Squirrel to strip down a version of a specific font you'd like to use
Explicitly set the font-smoothing method
Use a computed CSS property to offset the letter-spacing by a fraction based on the amount the resulting div width differs from the target. This will be accurate, but also complex and less compatible
Use JavaScript to do the above calculation instead, resulting in more compatible code
Render some PNGs beforehand, or server-side at runtime
Here's some sample code illustrating one way to get a more consistent cross-platform Arial text render.
html, body {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 13px;
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
font-smoothing: antialiased;
-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
}
First of all, validate your HTML. You have some issues there, like a missing DOCTYPE. I also recommend HTML5BOILERPLATE to get a lot of normalization done.
Next: why do you make the width dependant on the font size? Wouldn't it be better to make the font size static and set a certain static width to your elements?
If you are scared that this behaviour will lead to reading problems on small sceens (mobile devices), you should read about responsive layouts. They make use of media queries to use alternative CSS based on certain rules.
If you can't get it work, it would be fairly simple to load a .png of the text with a transparent background.

Print a HTML page in landscape mode? [duplicate]

I have a HTML report, which needs to be printed landscape because of the many columns. It there a way to do this, without the user having to change the document settings?
And what are the options amongst browsers.
In your CSS you can set the #page property as shown below.
#media print{#page {size: landscape}}
The #page is part of CSS 2.1 specification however this size is not as highlighted by the answer to the question Is #Page { size:landscape} obsolete?:
CSS 2.1 no longer specifies the size attribute. The current working
draft for CSS3 Paged Media module does specify it (but this is not
standard or accepted).
As stated the size option comes from the CSS 3 Draft Specification. In theory it can be set to both a page size and orientation although in my sample the size is omitted.
The support is very mixed with a bug report begin filed in firefox, most browsers do not support it.
It may seem to work in IE7 but this is because IE7 will remember the users last selection of landscape or portrait in print preview (only the browser is re-started).
This article does have some suggested work arounds using JavaScript or ActiveX that send keys to the users browser although it they are not ideal and rely on changing the browsers security settings.
Alternately you could rotate the content rather than the page orientation. This can be done by creating a style and applying it to the body that includes these two lines but this also has draw backs creating many alignment and layout issues.
<style type="text/css" media="print">
.page
{
-webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg);
-moz-transform:rotate(-90deg);
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);
}
</style>
The final alternative I have found is to create a landscape version in a PDF. You can point to so when the user selects print it prints the PDF. However I could not get this to auto print work in IE7.
<link media="print" rel="Alternate" href="print.pdf">
In conclusion in some browsers it is relativity easy using the #page size option however in many browsers there is no sure way and it would depend on your content and environment.
This maybe why Google Documents creates a PDF when print is selected and then allows the user to open and print that.
My solution:
<style type="text/css" media="print">
#page {
size: landscape;
}
body {
writing-mode: tb-rl;
}
</style>
With media="print" will apply only on Print.
This works in IE, Firefox and Chrome
The size property is what you're after as mentioned. To set both the the orientation and size of your page when printing, you could use the following:
/* ISO Paper Size */
#page {
size: A4 landscape;
}
/* Size in mm */
#page {
size: 100mm 200mm landscape;
}
/* Size in inches */
#page {
size: 4in 6in landscape;
}
Here's a link to the #page documentation.
It's not enough just to rotate the page content. Here is a right CSS which work in the most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE9+).
First set body margin to 0, because otherwise page margins will be larger than those you set in the print dialog. Also set background color to visualize pages.
body {
margin: 0;
background: #CCCCCC;
}
margin, border and background are required to visualize pages.
padding must be set to the required print margin. In the print dialog you must set the same margins (10mm in this example).
div.portrait, div.landscape {
margin: 10px auto;
padding: 10mm;
border: solid 1px black;
overflow: hidden;
page-break-after: always;
background: white;
}
The size of A4 page is 210mm x 297mm. You need to subtract print margins from the size. And set the size of page's content:
div.portrait {
width: 190mm;
height: 276mm;
}
div.landscape {
width: 276mm;
height: 190mm;
}
I use 276mm instead of 277mm, because different browsers scale pages a little bit differently. So some of them will print 277mm-height content on two pages. The second page will be empty. It's more safe to use 276mm.
We don't need any margin, border, padding, background on the printed page, so remove them:
#media print {
body {
background: none;
-ms-zoom: 1.665;
}
div.portrait, div.landscape {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: none;
background: none;
}
div.landscape {
transform: rotate(270deg) translate(-276mm, 0);
transform-origin: 0 0;
}
}
Note that the origin of transformation is 0 0! Also the content of landscape pages must be moved 276mm down!
Also if you have a mix of portrait and lanscape pages IE will zoom out the pages. We fix it by setting -ms-zoom to 1.665. If you'll set it to 1.6666 or something like this the right border of the page content may be cropped sometimes.
If you need IE8- or other old browsers support you can use -webkit-transform, -moz-transform, filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3). But for modern enough browsers it's not required.
Here is a test page:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<style>
...Copy all styles here...
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="portrait">A portrait page</div>
<div class="landscape">A landscape page</div>
</body>
</html>
Try to add this your CSS:
#page {
size: landscape;
}
Quoted from CSS-Discuss Wiki
The #page rule has been cut down in
scope from CSS2 to CSS2.1. The full
CSS2 #page rule was reportedly
implemented only in Opera (and buggily
even then). My own testing shows that
IE and Firefox don't support #page at
all. According to the now-obsolescent
CSS2 spec section 13.2.2 it is
possible to override the user's
setting of orientation and (for
example) force printing in Landscape
but the relevant "size" property has
been dropped from CSS2.1, consistent
with the fact that no current browser
supports it. It has been reinstated in
the CSS3 Paged Media module but note
that this is only a Working Draft (as
at July 2009).
Conclusion: forget
about #page for the present. If you
feel your document needs to be printed
in Landscape orientation, ask yourself
if you can instead make your design
more fluid. If you really can't
(perhaps because the document contains
data tables with many columns, for
example), you will need to advise the
user to set the orientation to
Landscape and perhaps outline how to
do it in the most common browsers. Of
course, some browsers have a print
fit-to-width (shrink-to-fit) feature
(e.g. Opera, Firefox, IE7) but it's
inadvisable to rely on users having
this facility or having it switched
on.
You might be able to use the CSS 2 #page rule which allows you to set the 'size' property to landscape.
You can also use the non-standard IE-only css attribute writing-mode
div.page {
writing-mode: tb-rl;
}
I created a blank MS Document with Landscape setting and then opened it in notepad. Copied and pasted the following to my html page
<style type="text/css" media="print">
#page Section1
{size:11 8.5in;
margin:.5in 13.6pt 0in 13.6pt;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:4;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
</style>
<div class="Section1"> put text / images / other stuff </div>
The print preview shows the pages in a landscape size. This seems to be working fine on IE and Chrome, not tested on FF.
I tried Denis's answer and hit some problems (portrait pages didn't print properly after going after landscape pages), so here is my solution:
body {
margin: 0;
background: #CCCCCC;
}
div.page {
margin: 10px auto;
border: solid 1px black;
display: block;
page-break-after: always;
width: 209mm;
height: 296mm;
overflow: hidden;
background: white;
}
div.landscape-parent {
width: 296mm;
height: 209mm;
}
div.landscape {
width: 296mm;
height: 209mm;
}
div.content {
padding: 10mm;
}
body,
div,
td {
font-size: 13px;
font-family: Verdana;
}
#media print {
body {
background: none;
}
div.page {
width: 209mm;
height: 296mm;
}
div.landscape {
transform: rotate(270deg) translate(-296mm, 0);
transform-origin: 0 0;
}
div.portrait,
div.landscape,
div.page {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: none;
background: none;
}
}
<div class="page">
<div class="content">
First page in Portrait mode
</div>
</div>
<div class="page landscape-parent">
<div class="landscape">
<div class="content">
Second page in Landscape mode (correctly shows horizontally in browser and prints rotated in printer)
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="page">
<div class="content">
Third page in Portrait mode
</div>
</div>
Here's what I came up with - add a negative rotation to the <html> element and a positive rotation of equal abs value to the <body>. That saved having to add a ton of CSS to style the body, and it worked like a charm:
html {
transform: rotate(-90deg);
}
body {
transform: rotate(90deg);
}
I tried to solve this problem once, but all my research led me towards ActiveX controls/plug-ins. There is no trick that the browsers (3 years ago anyway) permitted to change any print settings (number of copies, paper size).
I put my efforts into warning the user carefully that they needed to select "landscape" when the browsers print dialog appeared. I also created a "print preview" page, which worked much better than IE6's did! Our application had very wide tables of data in some reports, and the print preview made it clear to the users when the table would spill off the right-edge of the paper (since IE6 couldnt cope with printing on 2 sheets either).
And yes, people are still using IE6 even now.
<style type="text/css" media="print">
.landscape {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
margin: 0% 0% 0% 0%; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(Rotation=1);
}
</style>
If you want this style to be applied to a table then create one div tag with this style class and add the table tag within this div tag and close the div tag at the end.
This table will only print in landscape and all other pages will print in portrait mode only. But the problem is if the table size is more than the page width then we may loose some of the rows and sometimes headers also are missed. Be careful.
Have a good day.
Thank you,
Naveen Mettapally.
-webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); -moz-transform:rotate(-90deg);
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);
not working in Firefox 16.0.2 but it is working in Chrome
This also worked for me:
#media print and (orientation:landscape) { … }
The problem I faced is probably the same you have. Everyone here is using CSS to provide it statically, but I had to look for a dynamic solution so that it would change based on the active element without reloading the page..
I created 2 files, portrait.css and landscape.css.
portrait.css is blank, but landscape.css has one line.
#media print{#page {size: landscape}}
in my primary file, I added this line of html to specify portrait.css as default.
<link rel="stylesheet" id="PRINTLAYOUT" href="portrait.css" type="text/css" /></link>
Now, to switch you only have to change href in the element to switch printing modes.
$("#PRINTLAYOUT").attr("href","landscape.css")
// OR
document.getElementById("PRINTLAYOUT").href = "landscape.css" // I think...
This worked great for me, and I hope it helps someone else doing things the hard way like me.. As a note, $ represents JQuery.. If you are not using this yet, I highly recommend you start now.
If you are using React and libraries like MUI, using plain CSS in your React app is not a good practice. The better approach will be to use a style component called GlobalStyles, which we can import from Material UI.
The code will look like this,
import { GlobalStyles } from '#mui/material';
const printStyle = {
['#media print']: {
['#page']: {
size: 'landscape',
margin: '2px',
},
},
};
You might not need to use #page inside the #media print because #page is only for printing. Documentation
The margin will eliminate the URLs, the browser generates while printing.
We can use the GlobalStyles in our App container. Like this
const App: React.FC = () => (
<>
<GlobalStyles styles={printStyle} />
<AppView />
</>
);
It will apply the above CSS whenever we call windows.print().
If you are using other libraries besides MUI, there should be some components or plugins that you can use to apply the CSS globally.
You can try the following:
#page {
size: auto
}