Railfan Technology > TO: Soft text returns to fit posts to browser window

One of the things I've always appreciated about the threads on TO is that the text will reflow with soft breaks to fit any size browser window. This is especially useful when viewing the site on a laptop, or when viewing the full (desktop) site on a tablet or phone. It prevents one from having to scroll back and forth to read each sentence in a post.

Today, however, I noticed in this thread...

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?18,3724920

One or more posts is causing the text window to stay at a fixed size. It's much wider than my browser window on a 1440 pixel wide laptop. I didn't dig through the source code on the page above to see if I could figure out why it was happening. I just know it is. There doesn't seem to be any way to force the text to reflow. BTW, the mobile site reflows the text just fine. This is only if you are viewing the full (non-mobile) site regardless of the device.

I've been on other forums that do this and it annoys me so much that I generally avoid them. Too much scrolling makes the posts difficult to read properly. Now, since the recent upgrades here, it seems to be an issue here as well with some posts. Not all threads are doing this. In fact, the one mentioned above is the first one I've noticed it in so I'm hoping this is an isolated issue.

Anyone else being affected by it? Todd, any idea why and can it be remedied for those of us who don't normally view the site on large displays?

That thread flows off the page of my FF v37 browser too. Most pages don't. Very odd.

Scott Schifer
Torrance, CA
TinyTrains Website

The post by Fredo has a bunch of Unicode "non-breaking space" characters after the text "the SP Baldwin Park Branch." Don't know how the characters got there, but the browsers are trying to put the word "Branch." and all those characters on one line, just as they do URLs.

"Non-breaking space" characters are specifically intended to be used when you cannot accept a line break, so the browsers are doing the right thing.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/15 17:09 by clem.

trainjunkie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One of the things I've always appreciated about
> the threads on TO is that the text will reflow
> with soft breaks to fit any size browser window.
...
> the mobile site reflows the text just fine. This
> is only if you are viewing the full (non-mobile)
> site regardless of the device.

The cited thread does not wrap nicely on my iPad (my relatively new and first "smart" device); I assume that means I am viewing the full site. How do I view the mobile site? Or does my iPad misbehave?

I use an external keyboard on my iPad, and on trainorders.com, I cannot extend the selection using the shift and cursor movement keys, as I can on most other sites. Is this something that the web site controls?