[Sugar-devel] F11 for XO1 - Fonts

[Daniel Drake]

2009/8/18 Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu>:
> I'm thoroughly confused and frustrated.
>
> My POV: I'm authoring an Activity *today*. I'd like it to look good on all
> XO and (other) Sugar on a Stick screens (monitors) *today*.

I think you're out of luck then.  You could detect the XO somehow and
choose a good setting that works there, but as for all of the SoaS
machines in the world, they all have different displays and there
isn't going to be one default setting that looks good on them all
(hence our discussion of making this customizable by deployers and
users). Unless you want to place a personal guarantee that you'll
purchase any display that any SoaS user is ever possibly going to use,
before they use it. and even then you aren't considering the quality
of the users eyesight or the distance they will sit from the monitor.

> I am lukewarm at best to having a user option in Control Panel to make font
> size smaller or larger. (Please count me as a -1 for this suggestion.) For
> *my* activity, this would only allow kids to make text too small to read, or
> possibly overflow the screen

If the user clicks "make text smaller" to the point where the font is
too small to read then that's their problem, not yours, and they'll
hopefully realise that they can fix the situation by clicking the
"make text bigger" button.

If they make it so big that you run out of space in your activity, you
could dynamically add scroll bars.

If it really is important that you fill the screen with text without
scroll bars, then your activity would be an exceptional case that
ignores the Sugar font size setting, and instead dynamically
calculates the font point size needed to make the text fill the screen
nicely.

> Basically, I strongly feel that *authors* - not users, not the system
> (including upstream), nor even deployments - should determine their basic
> screen layouts. "One size" certainly does *not* fit all; and any/all
> defaults should be overridable by authors in their scripts. It should be the
> *author's* responsibility to make their activities look right on various
> monitors.

I disagree. This is an impractical responsibility to pass on. However,
activity authors can of course render any graphics that they like, at
any size, including fonts. They do not have to obey the font sizes
suggested by Sugar, as is the situation now (sugar provides one font
size in the GTK+ RC and another in profile.py but you can actually use
any font size that you want).

Daniel