Ask HN: HN and Linux – tiny fonts problem

by milankragujevic on 10/8/2019, 11:26 AM with 2 comments

Whenever I open Hacker News on Linux, the fonts are incredibly tiny, difficult to read and imo ugly.

This can be solved by installing ttf-mscorefonts-installer and accepting the proprietary license.

I have looked at HN's CSS, and it seems okay (has a fallback to a generic font family), but the problem I think is that the default Linux font for sans-serif is too tiny when the size is set to 10 pt. Verdana, ..., look fine at that size.

I would recommend that the site's CSS be changed in some way (I don't quite know how exactly) to fix the issue with small fonts on Linux.

P.S. Happens on Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint with Chrome and Firefox.

  • by brudgers on 10/8/2019, 12:36 PM

    I run this user script in Firefox using Greasemonkey. It will also run using Tampermonkey in Chrom[ium] as well. It might work for you until the CSS is changed. It might not.

      // ==UserScript==
  // @name        hn_resize_subtitle
  // @namespace   com.kludgecode.hn.demo
  // @include     https://news.ycombinator.com*
  // @version     1
  // @grant       none
  // ==/UserScript==

  window.$hn_subtext_text_target =  document.getElementsByClassName("subtext");

  for (var i = 0; i < $hn_subtext_text_target.length; i++)
    {$hn_subtext_text_target[i].style.fontSize = 12;};

  • by java-man on 10/8/2019, 2:57 PM

    This, I believe, is a systemic [accessibility] problem with any browser, since day one.

    They all should have additional settings:

    1. minimum font size

    2. maximum font size

    to solve this kind of problems once and for all. I am actually very puzzled why nobody ever thought of that.