Scaling text in responsive titles

smiller7502

I've complained on this forum before that Lectora does not scale text in text boxes in responsive titles, and I still think it should. But I discovered by chance today that it does scale text added to shapes. For most purposes, I plan to begin using shapes for text instead of text boxes so that the text will scale. I can make the shapes transparent with no outline, so they won't look any different, and they'll behave better.

However, we can't apply bullets, numbers, or hyperlinks to text in shapes, and we use those a lot. (We also can't apply indents or outdents, superscript or subscript, space before or after paragraphs, or justified alignment, which we use rarely or not at all. All of those options except justification could be achieved through other means.) It would sure be nice if all the formatting options available in a text box were available in a shape -- especially bullets, numbers and hyperlinks.

I suggest this in addition to making text in text boxes scale, not instead of it.

jasonadal

Be mindful of using text in shapes from an accessibility standpoint. Since shapes are rendered as images, the only way a screen reader will see the text is if it's alt-tag for the item...

smiller7502

True, and all the more reason Lectora should scale the text in text boxes. It seems like such an obvious miss to me that I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. What's the use case for shrinking images to fit on a small screen but not shrinking the text laid out around those images?

timk

The text isn't scaled automatically in order to keep it in a readable size. But you can scale the text for the different views manually.

smiller7502

Tim K, yes, I know how to scale the text manually -- one page at a time and sometimes one text box at a time -- to make it work. But it's preposterous that I should have to do this.

And I disagree with your premise that the text is deliberately not scaled to keep it readable. Do a Google search on your PC; then do the same search on your phone. Is the text the same size, or does it scale and remain readable? That's an important piece of responsive design.

This is incredibly straightforward in CSS. It simply requires using relative font-size values (font-size: medium; or font-size: xx-small; or font-size: 80%;) instead of encoding text boxes as rtf with \fs28 to represent 14 points. And relative text sizes are exactly what we see in the XML Lectora produces for shapes, which is why this text scales (correctly) while text boxes encoded with <rtf> tags do not. (And seriously, <rtf> tags? In a program that produces content intended to be viewed online?)

Heck, this is even straightforward in HTML, though no longer supported in HTML5: <font size="5"> scales to different sizes based on the size of your screen. (Well, technically based on the size of the window in which it is displayed, but for most purposes that's usually the same as screen size when we're thinking about phones.)

timk

The premise is not my own, I heard it in a presentation of Responsive Course Design a while ago. Usually I'd prefer Lectora to do less automatically as the outcome rarely suits my design. From my point of view I'm spending too much time on undoing Lectoras automatic formating or scaling.

klaatu

What a shame that we have rem's and em's and can't leverage their use properly because of the way Lectora scales content.