Blowing up text size -- bad idea?

[mtpastille]

I find it incredibly hard to read Chinese websites, because often the text size is set to somewhere around 12 pixels. Even if I know a characters perfectly well, I won't recognize it if it's got too many muddled strokes when shown at small sizes. One obvious solution is to just hit Ctrl+Plus and have the browser enlarge the text, but I fear that if I do that I will never learn how to read small Chinese text.

Should I bite the bullet and accustom myself to reading it the way it's intended or does it come naturally after having read lots of large text?

[feihong]

After you've been reading for a while, you start to recognize characters by their general shape, and you no longer need to see the inner strokes. Until that starts happening, keep increasing the font size. Be aware that it will probably take a long time, though.

[kari]

Thanks for asking because I wanted to know the same thing. Even with character shape, I don't see how anyone can read text that small. I have a hard enough time reading small English letters.

[creamyhorror]

Chinese characters on webpages are sometimes so small it's ridiculous. I say bump up the font size and don't worry about it. In real life, Chinese text tends to be at readable sizes (at least here in Singapore).

[马盖云]

For websites, we have it easy, we can always find a way to upsize the text... I have some printed Chinese books and dictionaries, seemingly printed on tissue paper, with extremely small text. Yeah, if you just need to reference something occasionally, it is an efficient information density, but man, it hurts my eyes.

Actually a worse impediment to reading text on Chinese websites is the incessant flashing, floating popups, music playing, etc.

哎哟！

[大肚男]

feihong's suggestion is right on.

like everything you will get used to it with practice, and you will notice that you will top paying attention o strokes and start reading shapes.

the same is true with reading in any language, i.e. when reading English you don't read the individual letter, instead you read complete word.

good luck getting there, and enjoy the journey

[abcdefg]

Old Mister Weakeyes here also votes for increasing the text size on web pages. No need to punish yourself. Reading Chinese is challenging enough, even with legible fonts.

Furthermore, as a low tech solution, I also have a magnifying glass for use on printed materials such as labels. Magnifiers are cheap in China. You can see the price on the one pictured.

It is a 放大镜 if you want to buy one at a stationary store (文具店).

[skylee]

字小傷目，護眼要緊。 (Small fonts hurt eyes; important to protect eyesight.)

[歐博思]

omg 100% agree! (that it hurts the eyes/hard to read)

Magnifying Glass吧

If you can manage it then change the system language into Chinese. The text seems bigger in programs afterwards. Maybe this can be changed without changing the system language too?

[ChouDoufu]

Feihong right. It gets better as your reading improves. I mostly read simplified, so whenever I need to read traditional, small fonts are sometimes an issue, but mostly it's not a problem anymore.

Chinese websites aren't great when it comes to readability. Font sizes are too small, and the common fonts used weren't designed to be displayed on computers. Once you add all the flashing ads and vide, it gets to be really really tough.

I've been working on a Chinese Reader for my website, 3000 Hanzi, that helps solve issues like this (and a lot more issues, too). It lets you import a url and it will process the page leaving only the main text. It also lets you change font sizes, switch scripts (trad/simp) and even put spaces between words (it uses state-of-the-art segmentation).

Reader is in the final stages of prep before an official launch in the next few days.

You can see a short video of it in action here:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzUzNTA5ODg4.html

Message me if you want more info.

[navaburo]

I believe that Hanzi are often displayed too small electronically for the following reason: We often embed hanzi within latin text (like this: 比方说). Effectively, we are forcing Chinese characters into the space between rows of Latin text. This results in a single hanzi occupying about twice the space of a single latin miniscule. However, a single Chinese character contains an amount of information on the order of 5 letters of English (wild guess here). --- Put simply, Chinese typed at 12pt will have a higher information density than English typed at 12pt.

A Shannon experiment or at least some frequency data could be used to calculate the information content of the Chinese characters, and then also the font-size required to achieve the same information density as English displayed in a particular size.

[yialanliu]

I just want to clear this up: Chinese websites are perfectly fine for local people who are fluent.

However, just like in the West, when you were 5 and reading "See Sopt Run" or Dr. Suess, the text was obviously bigger than what you are reading now .However, that has not hampered your fluency in english right? In reality, blowing up text if you need it is definitely okay and recommended as that's a normal learning method.

With regards to small font due to typing, that is not true. In reality, when you type size 12 font in Chinese, the spacing is more than size 12 font for Times New Roman actually. The spacing is adjusted already for this. I rememebr back in 6th grade and earlier, I was using 14 for english. Likewise, you might be okay to type 14 for chinese. However, with time and especially as you get better at chinese, size 12 is perfectly readeable.

[skylee]

Re font size. Please note that the reader's age and personal needs should also be taken into consideration. In my organisation the convention is to use Times New Roman font 14 to prepare documents (in English). However for a few individuals we had to enlarge the fonts to size 16 for them as they had to read a lot of papers and we didn't want to strain their eyes too much. The same applies to the OP. If he feels more comfortable reading larger fonts, he should enlarge the texts, or use a bigger screen, or both.

[mtpastille]

Thanks for another insightful discussion! I can now sleep comfortably at night knowing that I haven't sinned by zooming in.

[CleverClogs]

To facilitate zooming of Chinese fonts, consider installing the TongWen browser add-on. It's available for many browsers. More about the project on their home page: http://tongwen.openfoundry.org/.

Some links:

• Original FIrefox add-on: http://tongwen.mozdev.org/installation.html (description mostly in Chinese)
  
• 新同文堂 (New Tong Wen Tang) add-on for Firefox - this is an improved modification of the original add-on created by passerby@hk and softcup - this is the one I mainly use
  
• Google Chrome extension.
  

Note that the add-on does much more than just increasing the font size on the fly: it lets you force a specific Chinese font name to be used, you can switch from traditional characters to simplified and back again, and you can copy selected text to the clipboard as either traditional or simplified characters. The availability of these features may depend on which browser you use.

What I like about these add-ons is that they also allow you to only affect specific web pages, through the "filter site" option.