Another PP / Font issue

[Tim Frost]

I had somewhat given up on the responsive skins, since they still produced apparently random font sizes and paragraph spacing. This continued even after your advice (just after the release of PP3) to cease entirely using the Normal style. I had based everything on a new 'root' style named Body, and still found that font sizes which should be the same differed in different styles based on Body. The settings change from 92 to 100, advised in a different topic, made no difference. And 'space before' was lost entirely on Body (but not on its 'child' styles) unless I increased it from a value of 14.

I just installed 3.1 (with build 3791), and there is not much improvement. The 'space before' of 14 is now retained on Body. However I still see that all paragraphs with a bullet, and all paragraphs with a hanging indent, are reduced in font size compared to the surrounding paragraphs. I have deleted all output before building, and cleared the browser cache. Tested Chrome, Firefox, IE under Win7/64.

What can I do to eliminate this effect? For bullets, it makes the topic look odd and reduces the impact of the bullets, which are as least as important as the text above them. And we have dozens of different hanging-indent styles, all with different indent and tab settings, containing in many cases the meat of the topic. A smaller font size also makes the content look greyer and less important than the surrounding text.

I am aware that using a responsive skin has downsides as well as upsides, and that some compromises have to be made. But how can it be right to change the font size arbitrarily (it seems to about 75%-80% of the correct size) based on how a paragraph is formatted? Where I need specific text size I want to set it in a style and have it appear as I tell it to, not change size when I format the paragraph differently.

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim,

However I still see that all paragraphs with a bullet, and all paragraphs with a hanging indent, are reduced in font size compared to the surrounding paragraphs.

This is now also a known issue and it is actually caused by Help & Manual itself and not the skins directly. The problem is how HM sets the font size in styles and how it applies the styles in lists. For the time being there is a very simple fix. You just need to set the base font size in the skin to 100% instead of the default of 92%.

To do this, open the skin in PP Toolbox and click on the HTML Options button. Then scroll down to the Font Base Size button and change the setting there from 92 to exactly 100. This will prevent the font of text in lists from being displayed smaller.

[Tim Frost]

Thanks: I had tried this change before upgrading to the latest versions, and concluded (perhaps incorrectly) that it was not helpful. But added to the different responsive skin that I am now using, it fixed the problem.