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Topic: Resizing window with large fonts< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
Mikko
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Posted: Jan. 10 2006,18:50
Hi,

I have Large Fonts enabled on my system, and the result is that the browse pane is miniscule and I cannot make it larger by resizing the window. With my 1600x1200 resolution, it is frustrating that the application window is 1/4 of the screen and cannot be resized...

Because of this, I cannot even start to evaluate the program, which is a shame because I have read much praise for it elsewhere.

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts about the resize problem:

- First of all, Large Fonts is an important setting in today's world of LCD displays. My screen is 21" but still the default fonts caused my eyes to hurt (yes, even with DVI). And I'm only in my thirties! :-)

- Very few programs refuse to work with the Large Fonts setting. I've seen some clipped text in a few places, but usually nothing major. I'm sorry to say, but usually problems with Large Fonts are an indication of poor programming.

- My suggestion to get rid of all resize problems is to reduce the number of resizable areas. The standard practise in Windows programs is that controls (checkboxes, editboxes, etc.) keep their size. The only resizable thing should be the left-most explorer and file selection panes! It doesn't make sense to widen the editboxes anyway, and if you resize the window to 1600x1200, it certainly doesn't look pretty with normal fonts either...

- The above change should be easy enough to implement. It only requires the auto-resize logic to be disabled, and to resize the explorer and file list panes (and move the control area), on window resize.

- If you insist on keeping the auto-resizable UI, can't you just scale the size calculations? I mean, get LOGPIXELSY and LOGPIXELSX, and use them to modify your dimensions. Sorry if this is too obvious, you probably have tried many work-arounds already.

mikkon @ excelsql.com
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Magnus Brading
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Posted: Jan. 10 2006,22:04
Thanks for your input. Some answers follow:

- The number of programs that behave strange with large fonts have decreased during recent years, yes, but before they were many more.

- The problems with large fonts depend very much on the environment the program was created in. In the case of Mp3/Tag Studio, the environment is Delphi, which is where the problems come from. In large font mode in Delphi, whenever you try to set the position of something in your window explicitly yourself, the program is "kind enough" to recalculate the coordinates for you, with what seems to be some semi-AI-algorithm which sadly works very bad, and messes up the whole thing no matter what your original coordinates were. Rather than having to do with bad programming, the entire cause of this is the advanced structure of the GUI resizing in Mp3/Tag Studio, not only calculating larger areas of the window, but also optimizing the rescaling of the separate controls. This complexity is also why it is a pain to redo the resizing technique from scratch to prevent this from happening.

Redoing the GUI resizing code from scratch is on the todo list though, so stay tuned.

Btw, are you using the 3.5 beta (16), rather than 3.05? The large font support has at least been improved between these two versions.

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Mikko
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Posted: Jan. 13 2006,20:07
OK, Delphi explains a lot. :-) In my programming experience, Windows Large Font support is quite transparent to programmers and hasn't caused me any problems. It's Delphi's "intelligence" that's not intelligent enough then.

Yes, I was using the latest beta version (3.5/16). It auto-detected my Large Fonts setting and didn't allow resizing the window. With -resize the controls got messed up.

I still stand by my suggestion of making only the explorer pane resizeable. You might also want to look into the Win32 API function GetDeviceCaps() with LOGPIXELSX and LOGPIXELSY to "undo" Delphi's intelligence. I believe Delphi can call Win32 API directly.

mikkon @ excelsql.com
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Magnus Brading
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Posted: Jan. 14 2006,00:56
Thanks again for your input. And yeah, I actually already have another solution ready for whenever I have time for a full rewrite/redesign of the GUI code, it's the time needed for such a project that's the main problem.

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chrisfgee
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Posted: Mar. 07 2006,21:32
Hope that you can re-do the GUI soon. I use small fonts and would like to make MTS full screen, I thought this would happen when I registered. It would also be nice if I could resize the explorer window, it is annoying to have to scroll over tomake sure I have the right file selected.
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Magnus Brading
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Posted: Mar. 08 2006,18:27
You can indeed drag the corner of the Mp3/Tag Studio main window for it to be any size you want (including your entire screen), and you can also already resize the explorer tree by dragging the right side of it (to the right).

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