PathOfBuildingCommunity
Font Size
Visually impaired here, bold font I think would help a lot. Also one of the red colored fonts is much easier to read than others.
Example: https://imgur.com/a/9xN8G2t
"Mines can be detonated an additional time" is far easier to read than the other red text below. I don't know if that's due to my particular visual impairment or my monitor configuration or if it's universally true for others as well.
Thank you.
Need to see where the font is setup. I'll check tonight. I have a 4k screen and when i was looking at the Thousands and Decimal separators (#244) , i could not see the difference between the comma and the period. Note though that changing font size is going to cause issues with layout. It might lead to a nearly never ending set of layout issues.
The layouting almost exclusivly uses absolute positioning and the SimpleGraphic library is not really made for building scaling UIs. Any requests for changes to window/font scaling or unicode support are essentially asking for a complete rewrite of the graphics frontend using some technology that supports all of that out of the box.
What about setting a scaling factor for everything? Not just fonts. This should be easier right?
You are able to change the font size in the notes tab now with Ctrl + Mouse wheel
Adding font scaling to the rest of PoB is very difficult and state by ppoelzl above
To add to the chorus and hoping maybe in 2024 there would be time to fix this, here's how it looks at 300% scaling on a 55" 4K TV: . Path Of Pathing has the same issue but curiously, poeplanner looks beautiful.
Until then, you can disable the scaling for this program alone: https://superuser.com/a/1094206/41259
@chx Under what conditions does poeplanner look beautiful ?
I think PoB looks pretty good in your screen shot - what was it you wanted to point out ?
thanks X
Try setting Windows OS scaling to 300% and open PoB and https://pathofpathing.com/ and check them against https://poeplanner.com/ and https://vilsol.github.io/timeless-jewels/tree especially when you zoom out so more of the tree is visible and I think you will immediately see what I mean.
This is not a critique of PoB, I love you guys.
Programs can't know how large they are "supposed" to draw themselves. They have to rely on the operating system information on DPI scaling for how much larger to draw things themselves, or rely on the operating system itself scaling a low-resolution program window and its coordinates.
Path of Building currently relies on the operating system doing the scaling as it's designed and built in an era where you didn't really have much in the way of different display densities. As such, the contents of the window are a scaled-up lower resolution and looks fairly meh, but it's at least usable and with whole steps like 300%, still fairly crisp but blocky.
The work needed to be aware of DPI scaling and adjust sizes accordingly, and the work needed for user-configurable fonts and font sizes is quite similar. In the UI all coordinates are pixel-based and all fonts are pre-generated at particular whole pixel sizes. It's a huge job to adapt the UI logic to handle different scale factors and replace the font renderer.
In my experimental work with the new renderer I've replaced the font system with one that dynamically can create any font size, as well as do more complex text shaping for international scripts. I've also found out the hard way just how many pixel distances and sizes are hardcoded in the Lua UI and explored the ways it could be approached - introducing fractional scaling leads to a whole lot of complicated changes to the layout for it to still be crisp and make sense as sizes cross pixel thresholds.
The tools you mention have the benefit of being written from scratch more recently and running on web platforms that have a bit more innate ability to scale things properly. Our runtime is quite special and it's the reason why Path of Building is the way it is today - both positives and negatives.
In closing - we're painfully aware of this and there's work/thought on how to approach it as it's important both from an usability and accessibility perspective.
I just found it curious that one website out of the three behaved the same.
Anyways, everything you describe sounds familiar from a long, long time ago even if we didn't need to struggle with DPI but we did struggle when resolution kinda exploded on PCs. I remember GEM/Ventura looking absolutely terrible initially on SVGA (and yes, I am old).
I wish I knew enough Lua to help :(
@zao I recently got informed that PoB has the x/y (and other UI math) hardcoded. I'm willing to contribute and have an idea.
Make an abstraction for UI coordination/positioning and move it to the Simple Graphic library. Let Lua code only handle the logic. Basically, when creating a button don't pass any x/y stuff and the layouting can be done dynamically on a simple V-Box/H-Box widget tree (just pure tree/graph math, no HTML/CSS involved).
I have a working demo that implements this layouting concept, written in C++ (I have no Lua skills) and demonstrates some additional features like scrolling, hiding, spacing control.
I would very much appreciate a feature like this also, as I have a slight visual impairment, making the font size 1.5x size would go a long way to helping me immensely.
