Is this a resonable request? Fixed font size (1 Viewer)

[jackflack]

I know you can request features or improvements to StreamedMP. But I feel kind of silly making a request just for something that I would like. So I wanted to know what some people thought in the community before i made the request.

Also you may know a fix or workaround that would be just as useful and not waste any of the developers time.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 (maybe XP) allow for you to adjust the overall font size in the OS to scale to a percentage of the screen. If any of you have used the OS portion of your HTPC on your TV @ 1920x1080 you know you need to be a little closer to read some things in the OS such file names and folders, but not other things such as Web Browsers since that is handled independently and will not scale with the OS fonts.

However Mediaportal and StreamedMP do seem to scale with the OS fonts. I recently discovered this after the last update. I like having the OS fonts at 125% of the normal size but that translation into Streamed MP cause the fonts to be very over sized and crowded.

I would like to suggest to the authors that they lock the font size and not scale off of the OS fonts.

Here is what it looks like at 1920x1080 with 125% and without. As you can screen 2 looks the way it should.

 

[pilehave]

The scaling of fonts has not really anything to do with the skin, so your request/idea should probably be to MediaPortal itself

Maybe you could do a hack/fix where the installer reads the font-size from Windows (don't know if it is possible at all) and sets the fonts.xml accordingly to a font-size that suits better. Not an ideal solution though...

 

[jackflack]

The scaling of fonts has not really anything to do with the skin, so your request/idea should probably be to MediaPortal itself

Maybe you could do a hack/fix where the installer reads the font-size from Windows (don't know if it is possible at all) and sets the fonts.xml accordingly to a font-size that suits better. Not an ideal solution though...

Hmm ok. I thought all skin developers could control their fonts and font sizes. Since you can actually choose to make your fonts larger in StreamedMP - misc settings, maybe a choice to make them smaller too?

 

[pilehave]

The scaling of fonts has not really anything to do with the skin, so your request/idea should probably be to MediaPortal itself

Maybe you could do a hack/fix where the installer reads the font-size from Windows (don't know if it is possible at all) and sets the fonts.xml accordingly to a font-size that suits better. Not an ideal solution though...

Hmm ok. I thought all skin developers could control their fonts and font sizes. Since you can actually choose to make your fonts larger in StreamedMP - misc settings, maybe a choice to make them smaller too?

True. But those sizes are kind of fixed.

Say, if a default font in StreamedMP is 12 points (I assume it's points, never looked at the code of this part in MediaPortal) and you set your font-size to 125%, it will be 15 pojnts when scaled. What should it be set to in StreamedMP then; 9,6 points. But, you can only set integers (whole numbers) in the skin. So closest bet would be 10 points.

Maybe the skin-plugin can have a font-size setting with a drop-down with numbers ranging from 8 -> 72 points or so...

 

[sunfire7]

I have the same request as the Original Poster! any of you have a workaround or something?

 

[jackflack]

I have the same request as the Original Poster! any of you have a workaround or something?

So far I haven't found one. As was said earlier you could go in and extensively modify the font sizes but since it scales with OS fonts through Media Portal itself, it would be to time consuming for a regular user and if you wanted to go back, it would reqire the same amount of changes.

 

[bighick]

No doubt, I assume you are talking about windows DPI? I would like to increase mine but Me-Po gets nasty with it.

 

[csapollo]

I have the same request as the Original Poster! any of you have a workaround or something?

+1. Strange that I came across this thread, I've been having this problem since I started using MP.

I learned to deal with it, that is until you want to add new plugins to the basic home menu that have a few more characters than the main plugins..



EDIT: Just some further thought - my situation is not identical as far as the effect on MP goes. I also use the 125% DPI, but I have the horizontal menu bar in the middle of the screen without the context labels. My words basically "lean" against each other.

Is there any way to change the default gaps or character space horizontally for these words? Surely it must be defined somewhere..

 

[trevor]

I have the same request as the Original Poster! any of you have a workaround or something?

+1. Strange that I came across this thread, I've been having this problem since I started using MP.

I learned to deal with it, that is until you want to add new plugins to the basic home menu that have a few more characters than the main plugins..



EDIT: Just some further thought - my situation is not identical as far as the effect on MP goes. I also use the 125% DPI, but I have the horizontal menu bar in the middle of the screen without the context labels. My words basically "lean" against each other.

Is there any way to change the default gaps or character space horizontally for these words? Surely it must be defined somewhere..

Hi,

That is all built into the code, the menus are complex with each menu item requiring about 23 controls and chnages xpos, width and the slide animations - I did have a look at coming up with a formula to allow for the gap to be configured...will have another look.

cheers

 

[jackflack]

I have the same request as the Original Poster! any of you have a workaround or something?

+1. Strange that I came across this thread, I've been having this problem since I started using MP.

I learned to deal with it, that is until you want to add new plugins to the basic home menu that have a few more characters than the main plugins..



EDIT: Just some further thought - my situation is not identical as far as the effect on MP goes. I also use the 125% DPI, but I have the horizontal menu bar in the middle of the screen without the context labels. My words basically "lean" against each other.

Is there any way to change the default gaps or character space horizontally for these words? Surely it must be defined somewhere..

Hi,

That is all built into the code, the menus are complex with each menu item requiring about 23 controls and chnages xpos, width and the slide animations - I did have a look at coming up with a formula to allow for the gap to be configured...will have another look.

cheers

Yeah once i got some basic feedback I decided against submitting this as a feature request. Simply put, you guys do enough already that this is not a must have feature. But thanks for checking it out, I do appreciate that.