Screen

ESA has its own theme for the ESA website called ESA.  It resides here .../drupal/sites/all/themes.  The theme controls the screen layout, the menu appearance, the fonts, the font colours and size.  Note the Explorer uses larger fonts than most other browsers! :-(.  So a consistent look and feel across browsers is impossible.

The theme is a variation to the standard Drupal Garland theme.  There is a very good reason for this:

1. Garland is robust.
2. Garland uses tables for its layout.  Tabled layouts are not favoured by web designers and are on their way out.  However, 'tableless' designs fail if the content is wide, e.g. the wide Capability Directory Tables (typically the right-hand frame obscures or otherwise clashes with the table). 
   This means that we couldn't use, for example, the Zen based themes (which otherwise would be quite nice).

Note:

Theme design is an ugly process because browsers are so inconsistent in their interpretation of the standards.  Significantly Explorer fonts are larger then Firefox and most other browsers.

Tools

The firebug add-on to the Firefox browser is invaluable to  track down which style command in which CSS file is controlling the final appearance of some text etc.

Printing

Page printing is handled by the stylesheet .../drupal/misc/print.css which we modify to ensure a good printing of our newsletter.  This stylesheet gets trashed by upgrades to the Drupal core!  So afterward we must copy the version from the previous Drupal installation!.

A version of .../drupal/misc/print.css is given below.

Attachment	Date	Size
print.css	19/10/09 1:25 pm	4.34 KB