David Scotson

Font sizing is a nightmare, and none of the hacks and workarounds are ideal.

One thing I would suggest though to help is to ditch the Trebuchet font. It looks like you've used the standard Moodle selection of:

"Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

I would recommend:

"Lucida Grande", Verdana, "Bitstream Vera Sans", Geneva, Lucida, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

This means most users (Windows/IE) will see Verdana, which is better-looking (ihmo) and more legible on screen than Trebuchet, especially at smaller sizes and on systems without anti-aliasing.

The other options ensure that Mac and Linux users get beautiful, readable fonts that are suited to their platforms too.

Martin, if you're reading this, do you think we could add this list of fonts to the standard themes? (optionally with Trebuchet MS in there somewhere too).

Is it intentional that the font is mostly left to the user's default choice? The stylesheet specifies Trebuchet for certain places but that doesn't appear for me on Mac or Linux.

It might be because there is an extra comma at the end of the sixth line: body, p, td, th, li, {

I'd recommend validating your CSS even when the HTML is out of your control and doesn't validate, as it can catch some weird effects. In this case you'd need to move the mozilla extension stuff to a different .css file to get a clean report.

You might also want to add ul, ol, dl, dt and dd to that font list for completeness (mainly for the benefit of Nestcape 4 users).

And in case anyone else has missed one of the nicer touches of the design, try resizing your browser window and watch the logo in the top-right corner. I love that effect, subtle but brilliant, especially as the background has to be designed around IE's lack of PNG support.

I've not had a good look at it yet but I'm curious about what your design team were trying to achieve but couldn't. Do you have a photoshop comp, or design mockup for their original concept?


Constructive comment: I don't think the background colour of the breadcrumbtrail, exactly matches the green of the 'hillside' above it. It's almost impercetible on my Mac but under Linux it's more obvious.

Artistic comment: If I was going to do a 'wobbly' or 'swooshy' design, as you have for the header, then I wouldn't confine it into the predetermined boxes of the underlying layout. If you continued the same green colour down through the breadcrumb trail and into the main background section then you would hide some of the boxiness that naturally occurs in many web designs and also make it less Moodle-ly which I think was one of your aims.

I just did a Google search on a Moodle topic that returned some strange results.

I read Ian Usher's post about his new Moodle site but couldn't see a link (there's one now, so either he edited or I'm going crazy).

So I searched on Google hoping to find his site with the following terms: "ian usher moodle"

The results include what appear to be two complete mirrors of the Moodle.org site, that simply redirect you to the respective Moodle.org page.

• j2k.naver.com (which seems totally inaccessible)
• www.muprivate.edu.au (which is part of a private uni in australia who seem to have a standard moodle install atwww.muprivate.edu.au/moodle)

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?

I've made a couple of improvements:

• it now hides the sitesearch option if your Moodle is closed to Google, leaving a simple Google web search.

• it has a 'search only in my language' option that is useful in sites like moodle.org with multiple languages and no expectation that users will be able to read all of them. (It's not generally useful, I think, so I've left it commented out.)