bigger fonts

[Edgar]

I know nobody cares but me <grin>!

bigger.png (78.84 KiB) Viewed 6458 times

For myself, I am tired of not being able to read the little teeny letters! Make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the image and look at the Selection toolbar. Code available on request.

[Gale Andrews]

I would like to see the Spinboxes the same height as the project rate text box bottom left, and the font scaled accordingly.

I don't think the size you suggest would ever be accepted.

I think the blue on dark grey for the digits is the main problem. I would propose blue or black on white background for the unselected digits. Use the OS "selected text" foreground and background colours for the selected digit, or some other idea. I think it might even look OK if the selected and unselected background colours were exchanged.


Gale

[waxcylinder]

I've got ageing eyes with ever-hardening lenses - I now need +2 reading glasses - but I find the current font-size perfectly acceptable.

If we ever did it I would want font-size stting to be a parametizable option somehow (as many browsers do) with the default being as-now.

Peter.

[Edgar]

Has anyone considered what the default looks like on a high resolution (2560 x 1440 ) or 4K monitor? The image I posted is a result of increasing the size*by 50%. If I were doing this for production code instead of personal use I would add a user preference. I did not mess with the drop-down arrow sizes here but they should also be enlarged to match.

* Font size is determined as the largest font (-1) which will fit in the defined control box. It is more typical to specify the size of the font and then make the box fit, but either way works.

[pshute]

Has anyone considered what the default looks like on a high resolution (2560 x 1440 ) or 4K monitor? The image I posted is a result of increasing the size*by 50%.

Does that mean all the text is smaller? There are labels with much smaller text than the selection toolbar, e.g. The track control panel. And wouldn't this be affecting all your programs?

Windows or Linux? Can you adjust the font scale with a system setting? (I know in Windows this can mess some programs up.)

[Gale Andrews]

Windows can adjust the DPI for text and thus in many case the items that contain the text.

However Audacity isn't fully DPI compliant. The spinboxes (TimeTextControls) are one of the elements that don't scale up when DPI is increased.

So maybe a first step is fixing that, but I agree with Ed in so far as the spinboxes are a bit smaller than ideal given the questionable colour choice.

The other question is like Peter raised - do we want all font types, colours and sizes to be individually controlled, or just have some kind of global font type and size choice? The only configurable font I can recall at the moment is in the drop-down menu for the label track.


Gale

[pshute]

I don't know whether it's worth putting too much effort into making Audacity dpi compliant. If I was to increase the dpi to fix this problem, I'd be likely to find it messed up some other program, forcing me to set it back to normal again.

Better to have an internal setting? Surely a global one - would many people want to increase individual objects's fonts?

Is a screen magnifier an option?

[Edgar]

Has anyone considered what the default looks like on a high resolution (2560 x 1440 ) or 4K monitor? The image I posted is a result of increasing the size*by 50%.

Does that mean all the text is smaller? There are labels with much smaller text than the selection toolbar, e.g. The track control panel. And wouldn't this be affecting all your programs?

Windows or Linux? Can you adjust the font scale with a system setting? (I know in Windows this can mess some programs up.)

Currently I only use Windows 7. On any given pair of equally sized monitors (e.g. 27 inch) if one has a resolution of 2000x1000 and the other has a resolution of 1000x500 and the application asks for a 12 point font, and the viewing distance remains the same, the perceived size of the text on the 1000x500 monitor will be much larger.

The change that I made affects only the fonts in the Selection toolbar and the Time Text Controls. This has no effect on other programs. Changing a system-wide setting to make the perceived fonts larger would affect all programs equally and effectively reduce the monitor's resolution and the screen real estate. I do not want that!

I don't know whether it's worth putting too much effort into making Audacity dpi compliant. If I was to increase the dpi to fix this problem, I'd be likely to find it messed up some other program, forcing me to set it back to normal again.

Better to have an internal setting? Surely a global one - would many people want to increase individual objects's fonts?

Is a screen magnifier an option?

Audacity should be DPI compliant – it is just good manners on an application's part. As you point out changing the system's DPI affects every program including the desktop. Audacity (as well as, IMHO, all programs) should have a much richer interface allowing the user control of most GUI aspects. In re fonts, at a bare minimum, the user should have control of a global font setting although, I think there should be some independent settings for fonts in things like tooltips, the timeline, the wave track etc.

[waxcylinder]

Ed,

I suspect that rater than me transferring this and your other GUI changes to the Wiki that you would be better off writing a formal proposal in the Wiki.

Peter.

[Edgar]

I suspect that rater than me transferring this and your other GUI changes to the Wiki that you would be better off writing a formal proposal in the Wiki.

I see no benefit in creating a formal proposal; thanks for the thought. More than anything else these GUI posts were meant to generate some conversation about what was possible and desired.