[BUG] Profile tabs - icons take up 2 rows in linux

[WinterSnowfall]

Hi,

I've recently added two recommendations, and thus got the recommendations tab on my profile page, but also noticed that my profile tabs don't share a single row any more when I browse in linux. I'm using Opera 11.00, but have also checked the same profile page using Firefox 3.6.13 and the issue is still there, so I can assume this is not browser-dependant, but OS dependant, because the Windows XP version of Opera DOES put all the tab tags on a single row.

I'll post a screenshot below.



Hope this can be fixed quickly with some CSS magic :).

Thanks a lot.

[Drahken]

This is an ancient & known bug resurfacing in yet another way. The problem is that *nix's tahoma clone is slightly wider than the real tahoma. The difference isn't huge, but the site buttons have no margin for error.

This issue has previously been classified as "won't fix" due to the relatively few number of site users who seem to use *nix, and due to the difficulty of trying to fix it from the site end. Since more new people keep complaining about this issue though, it'll probably get moved up the priority list eventually.

In the meantime, this can be fixed on a per-user basis by the users themselves, by installing the real tahoma font. It seems to be pretty easy to do so on ubuntu (if you have the actual windows fonts handy): [ubuntu] How to install Tahoma font - Ubuntu Forums


In theory, this could be solved site-wide by using embedded fonts. Most (all?) recent versions of common browsers support webfonts via css3 now. The main problem would be potential legal/licensing issues, since tahoma isn't an open source font.


edit: Here's the original thread related to this: [Bug]Anime list - Button layout

There's a simple test to see if your browser supports webfonts, go here: http://allspark.net/cypherswipe/webfont-test.html
The font you see on that page should look like this:

[kenaniah]

Winter, can you name the linux distros you use and whether or not each one of them has a font called Kalimati? Unfortunately, I don't have a linux GUI on the network I'm in right now, but try firebugging and see if using Kalimati instead of Tahoma fixes the issue. If so, I'll see if we can add that to the font-family wherever Tahoma is located.

[Drahken]

One solution for this specific occurance would be to shorten recommendations to just "recs". Another solution would be to plan for the wider *nix fonts & just leave a little extra room.

Would it even do any good to add that kalimati font to the css? I mean, are you certain that it isn't the very font *nix users are already seeing, the one that's too wide? (The too wide font that's causing this issue isn't obviously wider than tahoma, you have to enlarge it & look very close to see the diff.)

[WinterSnowfall]

Thank you Drahken, I'll try installing the windows tahoma font in linux for starters, that's probably the quickest way to fix this.

I'm using Linux Mint 10 mainly, an Ubuntu 10.10 derivative. Kalimati seems to be included in the ttf-devanagari-fonts package, which is not installed by default in a normal english language setup as far as I'm aware, since it offers support for "Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Maithili, Nepali, Sanskrit, and Sindhi languages", so I don't know how much it would help to include it in the font family even if it did fix the problem. It still requires user intervention, roughly as much as installing the windows tahoma font does.

Some space/padding/size adjustments in the tabs themselves would be the most straightforward way to fix this, but it might not go as smoothly as it sounds and it might mess some other things in the CSS alignment if it's not carefully planned. All this because of a few extra pixels here and there. Ah, well it's not that big of an issue anyway, but since everything else works and looks superbly in linux, I thought it would be worth reporting :).

Thanks a lot for all the feedback.

[Kogoruhn]

As another linux user I've noticed this when I use Firefox but I don't seem to get this bug in Chrome

[Drahken]

One relatively simple way to address the issue would be to serve *nix users with a different css file, then have that file set all fonts on buttons to 1 size smaller than normal. This would make all the buttons fit in the spaces where they belong. It wouldn't look as good as it's intended to, but it wouldn't look nearly as bad as it winds up due to this fonts issue. (Users with this problem can see that this "fix" works by simply hitting ctrl+- or whatever your browser's text size reduction shortcut is. When you do that, everything falls into place.)

[sothis]

can people confirm if this is still happening?

[sothis]

can anyone with linux confirm?

[Crimm]

Sothis,

Are you just confirming the profile tabs in linux? Here's a few screenshots:

MAC:


Chrome


Safari


UBUNTU:
FireFox


Appears to be okay to me. I resized my Ubuntu VM and FF windows to see if I could get it to do it.