Font size preference / UI scaling

[alexjpwalker]

Problem to Solve

For users with very dense screens (e.g. 4k resolution on a small laptop), or users without good eyesight, the default font size is too small. Other applications such as web browsers allow you to zoom in on any page, but Studio (being written in Compose) has no such mechanism.

Current Workaround

Set the screen resolution or use a magnifying accessibility tool

Proposed Solution

• Add a font size preference to Studio.
• When Studio is started for the first time ever, auto-detect a sensible font size based on the monitor resolution and pixel density.

[jamesreprise]

There are quite a few hard-coded values within Studio, and changing the font size necessitates everything containing that font resizes to fit it. Icons are font characters thankfully, so this is easy to change.

It's possible that some of the relationships between font size and the size of the element containing it are not linear (or wouldn't look good if we treated them as though they were).

[jamesreprise]

This is additional functionality, removing this from the current milestone.

[larsw]

From an accessibility perspective, the lack of changing the font size is really a show-stopper for a lot of people, myself included. Can't see how this is considered "Additional functionality" 👎🏼

[jamesreprise]

From an accessibility perspective, the lack of changing the font size is really a show-stopper for a lot of people, myself included. Can't see how this is considered "Additional functionality" 👎🏼

Hi @larsw, I can see how my comment came off as dismissive of this as an important feature. I apologise for this.

Within this current milestone, we're only focusing on improving functionality that already exists within Studio. Allowing for changing font sizes throughout the whole of the interface is not something we support right now, so it is not within the functionality of the program and thus adding it would be an addition, making it additional functionality.

We do currently support zooming in the text editor using (CMD/CTRL) & + and we're interested in other ways we can improve the accessibility of Studio. We've been working on laying the groundwork for adding preferences for further accessibility improvements. Please let us know if there is anything else besides this issue that impedes your ability to use Studio easily.

[larsw]

Zooming would be very much appreciated!

From an accessibility perspective, the ability to change the theme to a high contrast one is also important for a lot of visually impaired users.

[sanmai-NL]

See also #537.

[hairmare]

setting a GDK_SCALE=3 env var seems to help on Fedora/GNOME/wayland desktops

[tae898]

setting a GDK_SCALE=3 env var seems to help on Fedora/GNOME/wayland desktops

Thanks! Running nohup sh -c 'GDK_SCALE=2 /opt/typedb-studio/bin/TypeDB\ Studio' & on command line works well!