[Sugar-devel] SoaS vis-a-vis XO-1.0/1.5

[Daniel Drake]

2009/12/25 Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu>:
> 1) Assumption: SoaS, for a variety of reasons, allows (even encourages)
> deployments and individual users to set different basic font sizes.

I think this is desired but is not (currently) true. The versions of
Sugar that are shipped by SoaS do not have a font configuration
mechanism. The (very new) versions of Sugar that do have this
mechanism lack documentation and a UI.
On SoaS and any system it is indeed possible to change the font
settings by modifying the Sugar source, fontconfig configuration or X
config, but I'm not aware of any such documentation on this topic -
making it largely inaccessible to deployments and users.

> Text-based activities thus need to incorporate scrollbars to cope with
> enlarged text. OTOH, the XO-1 deals with fixed screen format, and does not
> encourage changing the basic font size. Therefore, scrollbars are not
> necessary for such activities on the XO-1.0.

The XO1 screen can be rotated which is quite a substantial change in
screen format, I guess this will often add scrollbar requirements
where there weren't any before.

I'm preaching about an unimplemented feature but in the future all
Sugar users and deployments will be able to change font size very
easily (see the font configuration feature). My suggestions are:
 - render your text at the default size
 - if you provide zoom in/out functionality, make it a function of the
default font size
 - make your program dynamically add scrollbars and/or resize other UI
elements as space runs out

Then your software will work well in all configurations both now and
for the forseeable future.

Daniel