Thomas Hanley

Hi Stephen,

Many thanks for the info. So you can select a PHP string with CSS? Any pointers on how to do this would be appreciated. I am just curious how this works (and in which browsers it doesn't work!

~thomas

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for all of your excellent work in raising the standard of Moodle theme designs. I have been learning alot by looking at how you construct your themes. I also dream of the day where there is a more accessible / easier way to style the central content area within Moodle. Also find the navigation sometimes not to be ideal.

Anyway just a little bit of feedback on Anomaly. Looks excellent, very modern and stylish. One or two minor tweaks maybe possible, which I have highlighted below.

I am using Moodle 1.95. Screenshots are from Firefox.

Blue rectangle highlights how form fields cause a rectangle to pop out of the rounded box. Not sure if it is possible to fix this as it depends on the widith maybe of the items in the drop down boxes.

Green rectangle just shows elements which are centre aligned rather than left-aligned.

~thomas

Joseph,

Thanks for the lovely serifs. You are right that the question of font-size is very important (particularly with serif fonts such as Georgia). At the smaller end of the range Verdana is easier to read than Georgia.

On the question of accessible/readable/user friendly font-sizes this a good article to read:

http://www.baekdal.com/articles/usability/new-minimum-font-size/

In summary (for those busy Moodlers ; ) Thomas Baekdal recommends the following:

• Base CSS font size: 76% (used to be 70%)

This is comparable to:

• 12px Arial
• 11px Verdana
• 12px Tahoma (Windows pre-vista default font)
• 12px Lucida Grande (Mac OS X Default font)
• 12px Segoe UI (Windows Vista default font)

~thomas

Hi Joseph,

At last my opportunity to disagree with you ; ). Georgia is an excellent typeface for the screen. Sometimes designers will use Georgia for headings and Verdana for body text. However, Georgia can certainly be used for body text too.

The Georgia typeface was designed by the eminent typographer Matthew Carter specifically for display on screen. Incidentally he also designed the Verdana typeface.

http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm

~thomas

Hi Shaun,

I really don't know anything about servers. Had a quick Google on this and the only possibility I can come up with is maybe it is do with the character set being used.

If your Text Editor ( ie: Notepad on windows ) has a problem saving your files as utf-8, get another text editor. Lots of the Freely available ones are capable of saving in utf-8. also, be certain to save the file "without BOM". If you save it "with BOM", there will be some peculiar characters one the first line of the file when the server issues the file for rendering and trust me, it is a pain to get rid of those things.

The Meta tag used is <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />.

http://www.trap17.com/index.php/Small-Html-Problem_t52230.html

Worth a check though.

~thomas