Blue 3 Wide - Finally good font size (1 Viewer)

[SuAlfons]

I love the new font sizes!!!

Finally, we can read the EPG from the couch. (OK, we are sitting a little bit too far away.... 4m watching a 32" in 1366x768.

 

[kkendall]

@ Harley

I have set my videocard to 1080p@50hz for my 16:9 1080p 42" plasma.
Why would this be wrong for this skin??
Isn't everything just, lets say, squeesed to a smaller pixel, including fonts, pictures, everything?
Could you put the correct picture online for how it should look, the link doesn't work right now...

And if I set my videocard to 720p@50hz for my 16:9 1080p 42" plasma, how can I watch 1080p material?

 

[lisak]

Same here, fonts are made too big in my opinion.
I saw in fonts.xml (or something like this) that a lot of fontsizes were increased compared to B2. I manually decreased them down to a good size for my 42" tv. This was in my case sometimes even smaller that B2!
But I can imagine that people with a small tv like the bigger size.

I also wondered why the fontsize of the buttons in tvhome were of a different size than in the epg.
The epg gets too in your face with these large fonts. So I manually made the fontsize of all the buttons in MP (accept on homescreen) and the EPG the same size. Now on my tv it looks more homogeneous/more quiet/relaxing (don't know how to say this in english ) and all screens look more the same in my opinion.

The ability to choose fontsize in the settings, ie depending on screensize, would be an ultimate solution offcourse!


@ Harley

I have set my videocard to 1080p@50hz for my 16:9 1080p 42" plasma.
Why would this be wrong for this skin??
Could you put the correct picture online for how it should look, the link doesn't work right now...

Hi kkendall,

would you be so kind and post your modified files with smaller fonts? I have same TV screen and I just thinking to make fonts smaller ...

Thanks and have a nice Christmas ....

Lisak

 

[bobolito]

I was also looking for a way to have a font reduction. I have a 42" LCD running at 1080P. My problem was that most of the titles were being cut off or overlapping onto other objects and sometimes looked misaligned. I did an all around 5 point font size reduction in the fonts.xml file and now everything looks perfect. The original size was too large, but now after the 5-point reduction everything looks great.

With so many users with different screen sizes and resolutions, it only makes sense to have an option to change font size somewhere in the configuration program.

For those wanting to know how to do this, here are instructions on how to reduce the font size:

- First, close Media Portal completely. Make sure it is not minimized to the tray!

- Then, go into the skin folder inside where you installed Media Portal and go into the Blue3Wide folder (or whatever the name of the skin you are using).

- Then find the file fonts.xml and open it in Notepad or any text editor. Make a backup of this file first in case you screw up and want to restore your original font sizes.

- Next, find all the entries that begin with <height>. You will see a number after that. That number is the size of the font used for specific screens. Since it's hard to tell which font entry controls the screen you want to modify, I just reduced the number by the same amount on all <height> entries. So if an entry had 12, I changed it to 7, and if it had a 15, I changed it to 10, so essentially you are reducing all fonts in all screens by 5 points.

- If that's too much reduction for you, simply experiment by reducing the values by 3 points instead or any number that's convenient for you.

- Every time you make a change in the fonts.xml file, you must save it, and then open Media Portal to see if the font size is good for you. If not good, close Media Portal again and repeat instructions.

 

[JBravo]

A quicker way to reduce the font size of Blue3Wide skin is to just copy the fonts.xml from the standard Blue3 skin. If you don't like the result, follow Bobolito's guide above instead.

And don't forget to clear the skin cache folder.

 

[sixgun]

For those wanting to know how to do this, here are instructions on how to reduce the font size:

- First, close Media Portal completely. Make sure it is not minimized to the tray!

- Then, go into the skin folder inside where you installed Media Portal and go into the Blue3Wide folder (or whatever the name of the skin you are using).

- Then find the file fonts.xml and open it in Notepad or any text editor. Make a backup of this file first in case you screw up and want to restore your original font sizes.

- Next, find all the entries that begin with <height>. You will see a number after that. That number is the size of the font used for specific screens. Since it's hard to tell which font entry controls the screen you want to modify, I just reduced the number by the same amount on all <height> entries. So if an entry had 12, I changed it to 7, and if it had a 15, I changed it to 10, so essentially you are reducing all fonts in all screens by 5 points.

- If that's too much reduction for you, simply experiment by reducing the values by 3 points instead or any number that's convenient for you.

- Every time you make a change in the fonts.xml file, you must save it, and then open Media Portal to see if the font size is good for you. If not good, close Media Portal again and repeat instructions.

Thanks for the guide. To save on a little donkey work, I decided to knock up a little C# application to change the font sizes for me. I took your advice and went with a 5 point reduction and it looks perfect on my 1080i screen.

The application works on the standard input and output streams and takes one parameters. So, for example, to reduce the font sizes by 5 points :-

copy fonts.xml fonts.xml.backup
ChangeFontSize -5 < fonts.xml.backup > fonts.xml

It's a good idea to make a backup anyway, and besides the program will produce a zero byte file if you direct the output to the same file as you take the input from

Doing it this way also allows you to experiment by just changing the delta value.


I'm sure I could have written a perl/python/powershell script to do this, but I don't know any of those languages and I do know C#, so there you have it

 

[Bleazle]

Anyone wanting smaller fonts in B3W can just drop this fonts.xml file into the "MediaPortal/skins/Blue3Wide" directory. These are the font setting used in BleazleWide V6, which is based on B3W.

Remember to back your original up first just in case you decide you really do like the big fonts!

Delete the cache, restart MP.

Bleazle.

 

[booris]

Hi,

I just upgraded from 1.0 to the latest version of MP and font size has increased so that everything looks very ugly. Is there an easy way to get it look same as in previous version? Another problem is that skin animations are too quick now but that is not as big problem as the font size issue.