User talk:Vatsa1708

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Thanks for becoming a member of the TARDIS crew! If you have any questions, see the Help pages, add a question to one of the Forums or ask on my talk page. -- Tangerineduel (Talk) 14:10, 2 April 2012

Fonts
Hmmmm. I gotta say that I'm not quite sure what you're asking about. I've got customised fonts running through just about everything.

Seriously, almost every CSS element on the wiki has a defined font. And then there are some on-the-fly font classes/ids for easy use. If you want to narrow your question down a bit, I can help you better.

Or you could examine MediaWiki:Common.css. It's pretty well annotated. Much, though not all, of the font stuff is near the top of the file. 14:35: Mon 02 Apr 2012


 * Weird. Your CSS has much more complicated font declarations than this.  I mean you're importing fonts, which we don't do here. I'm sorta surprised you need my help.  Anyway, you just put Verdana in there.  Nothing complicated. font-family: 'Verdana'  That's it.  Of course, such a declaration will assume that all your visitors have Verdana installed on their machines.  That's a pretty good assumption, but there are undoubtedly a few people who won't have it.  (Linux types, mainly.)  Thus it's usually better to build what's called a "font stack".  (I'm sorry if I'm talking down to you, but I'm really confused as to your CSS abilities.) Let's take another look at the declaration you put on my talk page: font-family: 'Book Antiqua','Calisto MT','Lucida Bright',Georgia,'DejaVu Serif',serif;  What this is saying is, try to use Book Antigua.  If there's no Book Antigua, use Calisto MT.  If that's not available, go to Lucida Bright, Georgia, DejaVu Serif, in that order.  If all that fails then just go to whatever passes for serif on this machine.


 * The virtue of using a font stack is that it covers your bases. With the font stack I've created, I'm preferencing the slightly less common Book Antigua/Calisto MT/Lucida Bright, but I'm guaranteeing that I'll get some sort of sans-serif font.  If you just give font-family:'Verdana', then some people are going to fall through to Wikia default, Arial. The reason that I've defined so many is because I've chosen the most popular fonts on Linux and Windows machines that match Book Antigua.  Then I've given fallbacks for all three systems (Georgia is both the Mac and Windows fallback).  With this font family, only about .5% of all users will ever fall all the way to the simple "serif" declaration.


 * If you're entirely new to the concept of font stacks, you'll probably want to use any one of the many font stack generators on the web. I like Codestyle's font stack builder, but it's not the only one around.


 * So that answers the question of what to put in your font stack and how to build it. But it doesn't answer where to put it.  I'm assuming you know the main CSS elements that need font declaration in order for your site's text to be affected?  If not, you'll need to scan not just Common.css, but also our Wikia.css and Monobook.css, to see.   The biggie, of course is .WikiaArticle, but there are other key CSS elements that need font styling (like .h1, .h2, .h3, .h4, .h5, .h6) if you want to move all your text away from the  Wikia default. Luckily, we're a good wiki to look at, because nothing on our site is left in Arial.  It's 100% customised. So you can see the points you have to change.  The downside is that you have to customise everything to achieve it, sometimes to the point of adding   to override particularly stubborn Wikia defaults. 16:49: Mon 02 Apr 2012

Preset Font IDs
Okay, I've never seen any wikia wiki do this before, so lemme explain the theory behind these presets. Basically, there are a few "major" classes of fonts. There's monospace, serif and sans-serif — which are the ones I've defined. (There's also cursive and fantasy, but we don't use those here, so I haven't defined them.) Because I use certain types of fonts in certain, consistent locations, there was a need to quickly style text in a particular style of font. Moreover, because my font stacks are huge, I really didn't want to be putting the whole font stack in every single time I wanted to change a headline to sans-serif.

So what I did is to make both ids (#sf, for instance) and classes (.sf, for instance), to define a whole type (or family) of fonts. This then allowed me to transform text in a super simple way. So if I want to make a few words of text monospace within a sentence, all I have to do is type,. I can then be assured that I'm using the same font stack of monospaced fonts in exactly the same way every time. And I do it a fraction of the keystrokes. This becomes really important when adding to templates, because it can become quite a nightmare if you have to worry about really small islands of text. Also, having a place in the CSS where I've centrally defined the fonts means that if I have a need to style fonts on a particular new element, I just return to the top of the page, grab the font family and insert it where ever I need it.

This method arose, I suppose, because of indecision. Initially I couldn't make up my mind whether I liked Georgia or Book Antiqua best. So I had some of my declarations with Georgia as the lead font and some with Book Antiqua. This led to a noticeable inconsistency. So defining the font families for each major font type really helped out.

If you're not going to mess with a mixture of different font types — like if you're going Verdana and only Verdana — you might not need to go to this trouble. But because we basically use serif for the body of articles, sans-serif for the section heads and infoboxes, and monospace for occasional bits of clarity (as with ISBN numbers, where it's important to distinguish between numerals and letters), I find this stricter definition indispensable. 18:45: Mon 02 Apr 2012