Not for the first time I'm lambasting "reghardware.co.uk" for the eye strain caused by miniscule sized fonts.

All the OTHER sections of Theregister.co.uk are in sizable fonts - why the f**k is this section different !!

It's fine here. I'm running on a 14" laptop screen at 1400 x 1050 and have no problems reading the text.

My experience is the opposite of AC's up there: reghardware articles are beautiful while the rest of The Register is incredibly ugly. Not small, just ugly.

Specifically, ugly when viewed on Opera 9.x under Ubuntu 7.10. It's fine on Opera 9.x under Windows XP, and fine under other browsers. So great, it looks good on every browser except the one I actually use...

I was finally moved to investigate this. Reg articles include this in the HTML:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/style_picker/layout" media="screen, projection" />

For Opera, this ends up loading the style sheet <http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/style/layout/opera.css>. Inside that we find:

body, textarea {

font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

background-repeat: repeat-y;

}

So it prefers Helvetica font to others. Apparently my Ubuntu installs don't have a valid Helvetica font because it looks like, well, Hell. Like an 8x8 pixel font clumsily blown up to to actual 20x20 or so font cell. I tweaked it to "Arial, sans-serif", and now things are beautiful.

To tweak: create "theregister.co.uk.css" somewhere, contents "body, textarea { font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; }". Now right-click on an El Reg page, Edit Site Preferences...; give it the path to the file you just created. Reload page, it should be pretty.

El Reg could perhaps do this themselves when specifically coughing up a style sheet for Opera. The again, Opera ought to handle it better; and Ubuntu ought to include a decent looking font under the "Helvetica" name. Blame all around.

AC could chase down his size problem similarly. (Actually I believe I have some spam laying around here which claims to help with that problem, no wait, better get my coat...)

>Bela<