Eric K wrote:
The search results are in small font (<small>). I'd like to increase the font size (and maybe change the red color) a bit. Looks like the use of the "<small>" tag for the search formatting has been hard coded in SpecialSearch.php. Is there a way to effect the formatting without modifying internal files, for example using Mediawiki:Common.css?
1) You could make the red match text green by adding this line to Mediawiki:Common.css
.searchmatch {color:green !important}
(I don't know why !important is required but it didn't work for me without it.)
I cooked that up by examining the page source of a search results page for my MediaWiki site in my browser and noting each search result match is within a <span class="searchmatch"> ... </span> tag.
2) To change the size of <small> for only the search results page, note the search results page's body tag has four class labels and the last one, page-Special_Search, is probably exclusively for search results pages:
<body class="mediawiki ns--1 ltr page-Special_Search">
You can probably set <small> on search results pages only to whatever you like with a line like this in Mediawiki:Common.css
.page-Special_Search small {font-style:italic; font-size:larger}
(That style's <small> tags within class="page-Special_Search" to be whatever you type within the { ... }. I only added font-style:italic to show you can do more than just size here. I don't actually recommend italic for that text.)
I keep this bookmarked: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/propidx.html
I prefer to not tinker with the defaults, myself. Life gets complicated fast. I focus on essential stuff like keeping a back up of my wiki's database instead.
Good luck,
Roger :-)