Drupal Dilatant: Discovering that you're didn't become an old old man overnight

One of my all-time favorite Drupal modules is the Administration Menu , as it is for so many other Drupallers. How did we work before it came along, we might wonder.

Then one morning I come to the computer and all the admin menu’s fonts look a bit smaller, broken-up, smudgy and therefore difficult to read. I don’t have time to worry about it and make do, although it’s now a chore to use the menus that I constantly have to use.

Then the exact same things happens on a different site I’m working on a few days later! Again the menus are harder to read. And it only happens in Firefox and not in IE.

This can’t be just me, I realize. I Google-search Drupal.org and the module’s issues queue. Not a word about trouble with FF. There’s just trouble, predictably, with IE, caused by its ClearType rendering. Go Microsoft! It has to have a bug in every conceivable arena.

“Hum. What do you expect from this issue? Fix Internet Explorer’s ClearType font rendering? Surely impossible. Sorry,” is the smart-ass but apt response to one complaint about IE’s bug.

But how could it be that no one else has my issue with FF? Are my eyes going bad? Am I aging so rapidly, like the little mousy guy in Bladerunner, that I don’t even realize it anymore?

While going through issues posts and after trying a few things with Windows XP’s display settings, I think of checking FF’s VIEW menu. There’s something called “zoom”, which I suppose is just a hip word for smaller or larger text. I enlarge the font one step and the admin menu text pop into focus as if Jesus himself had just healed my eyes.

All this time, it turns out, I’ve been inadvertently building websites with the browser set to the wrong font size.

So it turns out, after all, I am getting old.