Browser function: Automatically show hanzi in larger font

[lokki]

What I want: I am missing a function in the browser that could be described simply as: "Detect all hanzis in webpage content and apply a minimum font size to them". Applying a font of my choice to them would be a nice extra too.

I use Firefox as my main browser, with zillions of nifty plugins and add-on functions available. I was just wondering if there isn't anyone out there who has already thought of this?

And then the inevitable rant part, that explains why: I suppose reading hanzi at font size 10 or 12 is OK for the natives, who can guess what each character should be in any case, but us poor laowai learners haven't got a chance really, and that includes much of the material posted on this forum :o( . Squinting desperately at those ant-sized squiggly jumbles of strokes doesn't help either, it just gives you a headache and might contribute to putting you off hanzi learning and reading practice alltogether.

I'd be interested to hear of any existing attempts like this for Firefox or any other browser. Or if you think you'd be interested to have this kind of function, let's hear from you too.

[gato]

Have you tried changing the font size used for viewing Chinese under the Tools->Options->Content menu? See picture below:

[character]

I generally just use the CTRL+ key combination a few times to increase the font size of a page if I have trouble.

[Luobot]

One of the most useful (and of course, free) Firefox extentions that I use all the time is Accessibar.

You can assign its functions to toolbar buttons or shortcut keys to perform the following functions:

• Increase and decrease Font size.

• Change web page fonts and background colors from a selection of 70 colors on current session

• Line spacing can be increased or decreased to five different spacing settings incrementally.

• All images (including Flash) displayed on a web page can be selected as being hidden or shown.

• All changes made to web page display can be restored to original page settings by pressing “Restore Page“.

• Changes made to the currently displayed web page persist until “Restore Page“ is selected.

• Integrated Text To Speech reader. Reads out strings hovered over as well as focused elements.

• Reader settings can be configured allowing the selection of the voice, volume, speaking rate, pitch, and voice range.

It works on all text, but it's especially useful when you have an html character transcript or a web page with lots of characters that you want to enlarge or increase spacing between the lines for easier readability. And as indicated in the feature list, above, it performs lots of other tricks, as well. You should check it out and see if meets your needs.

[lokki]

Thanks for the suggestions folks. I'm sure some of that will be of some use to me too, but none of them really seem to do what I was after.

The suggested methods seem to change the fonts for entire pages at a time. For instance, I was aware that you can change the settings for "Chinese Simplified" as per gato's instructions (thanks for that anyway) but that will only have an effect if the entire page is encoded or viewed as "Chinese Simplified", and then it affects the entire page, not just the hanzi. It has no effect on the postings in this forum, since they are encoded as "unicode" by default, and when you select to view them as "Chinese Simplified" it affects the size of all text on the page, hanzi and other letters alike.

So, unless I have misunderstood those answers, my original question stands. "Function to set a minimum font size for hanzi content on any web page" (and by that I mean _only_ the hanzi, and _any_ page regardless of character encoding - or at least so it works for unicode).

The quest is still on. Anyone?

[character]

You could write your own GreaseMonkey script: http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/toc/

You could make your own font with the English characters smaller than the Chinese ones.

I think it's best to learn to recognize tiny characters, and only CTRL+ when needed.