Re: Tiny links for html pages on mobile

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 09:07:56PM -0700, Raymond Toy wrote:
> Visit, say,
> https://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/docs/cmu-user/html/Floats.html#Floats on
> a mobile phone.  Everything looks quite nice but if if scroll down to the
> bottom, the links to the next sections are super tiny.  When viewed on
> desktop, this looks great.
> 
> This was created with 6.6dev.
> 

It is due to a "font boosting" (mis)feature (also called "font 
inflation").  For some reason, when a web page is laid out on a mobile 
phone web browser, there is an intermediate step of laying it as if the 
screen was larger than it is.  The web page is then shrunk to fit on the 
screen.  However, this would make the text too small to read, so 
selected parts of the website are selected to be increased in size
(the intention is that some parts of the website that the user didn't 
want to be able to read anyway are kept in a small font).  Of course, 
the heuristic used to decide this doesn't always work.

It is probably possible to disable using CSS, but I couldn't find 
anything authoritative on the right way to do it.  If somebody wants to 
experiment and finds something that works, it could be added to the 
default CSS output in HTML files.

Relevant web links:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186
https://jwir3.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/font-inflation-fennec-and-you/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13430897/how-to-override-font-boosting-in-mobile-chrome