GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 481118
Keyboard layouts are unreadably small
Last modified: 2008-05-10 20:19:01 UTC
The bug has been opened on https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/48101 "System/Preferences/Keyboard shows/Add shows a list of all available keyboard layouts with an example of how they look. However, that example is, by default, so small it's impossible to read the keys. One solution would be allowing to zoom in, another would be to give a bigger window, or allow maximizing the window (without having to drag the borders of the window). ... Still a bug in gutsy. ... http://launchpadlibrarian.net/9518505/2007-09-27-100642_680x377_scrot.png ... This shows the default window size shown when I click "show current layout" on the keyboard switcher applet. There is enough space in the keys to show a legible letter, but the space is just not used effectively."
Some while ago it was decided that gnome should work on 800x600. That is how the default size of the window was defined. In order to improve user experience, the layout preview dialog saves its size in gconf - so once you made it large enough, it next time will open with the same size. Taking the full screen at first appearance I would consider is user-unfriendly. Since that is the dialog, there is no "maximize" button (though I would like to have it there). So, I am not sure there is something to do here...
The new Ubuntu comment suggests that the font used is not ideal and it's possible to do something better on the same dialog
At the moment, we are using the default font. The font size is proportional to the diagram size. I could change the ratio from 36000 (IIRC it is empirical value introduced by the previous maintainer) to something smaller. But I am not sure it would improve things - very small font would be difficult to read...
I really think that there should be done something about this issue. I read today about a font made specially for small displays, it is called Silkscreen and it is free (AFAIK both as in beer and freedom): http://www.kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/ - it contains only latin characters, but it would be at least something. Or, on unrelated note, there is much space wasted on individual keys in my system, could not be just made that the letters on the keys take more space, i.e. make them bigger?
Tomáš, 1. Latin-only font is useless for the dialog intended for displaying a lot of non-latin characters 2. what you are asking is making font size variable, different for different keys. IMNSHO it would look rather ugly.
Sergey, 1)yes, you are right. 2)well, not really, at least I do not think I am asking that. I attach a screenshot how it looks on my system with resolution 600x800. It is barely readable and even this is bigger than what you get when you first click "Show current layout". What I am proposing is that each character on a key should move futher to its corner and thus creating more space so that the character would e bigger. Even M and W have plenty of space around them, and I am not sure if there are bigger characters than these two - but if they are, I do not think they are so big they could not be bigger and thus better readable. - as is said in the original bug report:"There is enough space in the keys to show a legible letter, but the space is just not used effectively." 3) Also, there are several suggestions in the original comment, for example allow to maximize the window, why is that not allowed? Is it against HIG? 4) do you agree that this indeed is a problem, however small?
Created attachment 100828 [details] how it looks on my system
2) Well, I'll play a bit with the character size. I am not sure it would look nice though. 3) Maximizing dialogs (it is a dialog!) is not possible. There is no even API for it in gtk. Sure, workarounds can be done - but IMHO it is against HIG 4) May be. But I have some good news for you. Just yesterday I committed the code which allows to print layouts. So, you can create pdf or poster or whatever - as large as you like!
2) nice, hod did it look like? 3) Oh, I see. Did not know:-). 4) well, that is nice (very nice), but I do not think it solves this, because we are talking about first user experience. It is rather easy (though unintuitive) to change the size of the dialog so it becomes readable so printing is not needed for this to be usable.
I agree that it's important for this dialog to fit into 800x600 screens, but on my computer with 1600x1200 it also feels wrong to have the dialog crammed so small that it's unreadable. I don't want to spend time "fixing" dialog sizes all other gnome the first time I use them, I want gnome to give me a polished look by default straight out of the box. It would be very nice if somebody could think of some smart scheme to set the default size of windows in GNOME so that it looked good on all resolutions. We do this today for widgets by using layout managers instead of hardcoded x,y for each widgets position and width/height.
Now, the default size is 0.75 of the screen size. I cannot make it "exact" screen size since calculating the actual available area (without panels) is non-trivial, I am just doing some reasonable guess. If you have more ideas/patches - feel free to reopen
Hey, great work Sergey! I'm looking forward to testing this out once it hits Ubuntu repositories! :-)