kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/2/2018 8:11 AM, jp charras wrote:
> Le 02/05/2018 à 11:03, Jeff Young a écrit :
>> If your screen reports  a height of 900 pixels or less we scale the system-default fontsize for PCB_EDIT_FRAME (but not FOOTPRINT_EDIT_FRAME).
>>
>> This results in poor readability on at least some MSW systems (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1767965) and for those with ageing eyesight (i.e. me).
>>
>> On OSX, it also doesn’t help as the row height is controlled by the checkboxes.  So the list doesn’t actually get any shorter with the smaller fonts (although it does get marginally less wide).
>>
>> Judging by the screenshot in the above bug report, MSW also doesn’t really benefit from the scaled font: the Render list is still much shorter than the vertical icon bar.
>>
>> I’d like to remove the scaling on at least OSX and MSW.  Are there any objections, and are there any reasons not to remove it on GTK as well?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jeff.
> 
> AFAIK, reducing font size was useful when a lot of layers is used (16 to 32 copper layers) and/or
> there are long copper layer names or when a big font is in use.
> 
> Without removing this feature, the best way is to reduce the size with a minimal acceptable final
> size ( for instance >= 8 points).

The problem with a fixed font size is on high dpi displays they may be
unreadable.

> 
> Obviously, if the default size is already small, a smaller size is not useful, and a reduced font
> size gives not readable texts.
> 

I propose that in the short term we use the reduced font only for gtk on
linux where it seems to work fairly well.  In the future, we could just
make the layer manager font a user option rather than try to guess what
scaling may work on a given platform.