is it possible to detect the display size before opening the window so that it can default to a larger size on larger displays? can the text font size be changed? i’m worried that a 4K display might be totally unreadable, if i get one on my next computer.
what might be of interest to many people is a way to run their home apps remotely. but, security can be a big issue for that. critical home apps like banking should not be exposed like that. Gramps as a cloud based service might be a future thing. i’m experimenting with Xvnc right now to try out cloud based Linux “desktop” service.
800x600 is a more than 20-year-old standard. It’s very very hard for me to believe that even 1% of users have displays this small.
Again, if they’re using screen doubling, then that’s the fault of the theme designer.
Yes. I’ve increased mine. (Adwaita theme with 14-pt Helvetica and text on the toolbar.)
Perhaps someone could design a “easy-to-read” theme and make that part of the shipped options.
The Themes is an add-on, not a built-in. [So auto-detect resolution and auto-scale fontsize is off the table.]
But I set the fontsize to 20pts and it worked well.
Gramps also remembers window placements & resizings. (They are stored in the gramps.ini file in your User Directory.)
So there’s a viable workaround to any problem with too tiny fonts on high-res screens… and it just requires installing an add-on with zero new development.
if the window in unreadable, the process of installing a add-on could be very hard. but if add-ons are just file(s) placed in a particular place, then i could do that from the system CLI (i have that sized as needed).
Well, you could do the installation and configuration from outside the interface. But it’d be too easy to break things.
It is a lot easier to force the Resolution on your desktop monitor artificially low while you install the Themes add-on and set the fontsize in that Tab. Then boost the screen resolution back to normal.
kind of awkward (the screen moves in the opposite direction as the mouse is moved), but seems like the right way to do it.
Speak for yourself. 
Changing the resolution of their monitors is something I would bet most Mac users never ever do, for example.
It’s not 1995. Users have high resolution displays they don’t have to monkey around with.
1 Like
Changing resolution on macOS is easier now than it was before. Or rather, became easier with retina display macs in 2014 or so. Just go to display settings and choose scaling you like.
There’s no way I would use pixel for pixel scaling on any display. Scaling makes it possible to actually see something, not needing to zoom everything in every app separately.
That also means that if I happened to have 1600x1200 pixel display, I probably would use it scaled to 1200x900 logical size. Not hard to find case where 800x600 scaled logical size makes sense.
On macOS scaled displays support higher resolution images (and fonts and so on) that are drawn on hardware resolution canvas. It’s even possible for app to request both scaled and unscaled canvases for drawing.
Things have progressed greatly since the times I edited X11 display timings by hand.
1 Like
Sure, it’s easy, but my point was that nobody does it, and I’ll bet 95% of users have no idea that it’s possible.
More broadly if you’re relying on users to monkey about with their display resolution in 2020, you’re doing it wrong. 
Hey… That’s why we’re talking about a workaround!
A ‘Help’ thread is a Support discussion… not a discussion of Development Blue Sky opportunities.
Anything is possible in design. We’re concerned with what IS or can be hacked.
Then I have misunderstood your previous posts which seem to suggest that changing display resolution was a reasonable approach.
1 Like
Compared to zooming in every app and webpage? Yes, I think it is reasonable. IIRC when you start using a fresh retina display mac, it’s in the getting started or tips even.
It has been made easy for many reasons, some of which include users with poor eyesight who have relied on zooming in all apps separately.
As I noted, had I not changed my display towards “larger text” (no, don’t need to know about pixels, it’s been made easy for real), I would still, in this year, be zooming in every app there is. Because of my poor eyesight. And that would be annoying, hard to manage, and never working properly. Or at least that’s how it was before OS support for display scaling.
I do not know how easy similar feat is in other operating systems. I certainly hope it’s easy, as it’s an important accessibility feature.
—
What is relevant for window size thread when talking about pixels, though, is that whatever the means to change display scaling (display settings, accessibility settings, separate apps), if your display is fairly small, you can easily end up with small (compared to pixels in typical displays today) logical resolution. And logical pixels are what apps are supposed to use for anything user interface related. Whether it goes as far down as 800x600 or not I don’t know. 1200x900 or 1200x720 certainly is reasonable.
I think we’re agreeing here. Apps use your settings and have reasonably sized fonts and widgets…or they should.
Which gets to my point that the themes in Gramps should have reasonable font and widget sizes. I’ve increased mine to something I find more reasonable, but suggesting that users will change display resolution in order to adjust settings in an app means something is wrong with the app’s design in the first place. IMO, of course.
2 Likes
however, a frequent problem is that things can be displayed too small. this was first seen on web sites so web browsers adopted easy-to-use scaling early on. they did not all do it exactly the same way. one browser scaled the result of layout while another scaled certain setting and re-ran the layout.
system display scaling is done a few different ways, too, but it is available, at least in some form, fairly widely.
even better, might be, an easy way to manually set things in the theme, by the user, without having create a new theme (unless that is real easy). making a theme in the form of a file with content like an INI file (python has ways to read and write these … BTDT) may be easy for many people but hard for others (a separate theme tool could help). the defaults should be reasonable in the intended context. a “big letters” theme obviously should have a larger start/default size.
i also would like to be able to reduce the gap between lines separately from font size (make better use of tight space).
X windows on Linux (and probably other OSes, depending on hardware), can change the display resolution easily. it was a while until i learned it. when the resolution is changed, it keeps the desktop at the same size. there are fewer pixels being shown. so there is a smaller rectangle that slides around the desktop (tracked with mouse movement). you can see the part of the desktop that rectangle is over. move the mouse to move the rectangle. it keeps the mouse point inside as it is moved around.
another tool can change the size of the desktop. i have tried this but i have forgotten how. it wasn’t easy. it was easier to create a new userid just for a different desktop. but i did create a 3840x2160 (4K) desktop under my 1920x1080 (HD,2K) display screen. i played a 4K YouTube video in full screen mode and could see all the video pixels, but not all at once.
This is doable with the plugin “Theme preferences”. On my system I have four themes and each others easy changing of the default font and font size. (The win32 one is so authentic that it gets the size much too small!)
I recommend incorporating its functionality into the app.
Oh, I also see that I have
what else do you have??