Customised dialog font

[James Clark]

In previous versions it was possible to customise the font used in dialogs (I found this very useful to make them slightly larger than default to make them more readable). But, in build 442 I can't find this option. Has it been lost/moved?

[Zoë]

Cirrus hasn't supported that setting in quite a while. We're always following the OS defaults now, using MS Shell Dlg (Courier New), MS Shell Dlg 2 (Tahoma), or Segoe UI depending on the OS.

The option in BC2 (and early Cirrus releases) was just there because we weren't sure what to use. Now that we're following their official MS UI recommendations we don't really want to keep around an option that tweaky.

[James Clark]

Actually, it's not so much the font (typeface) that I'd like to change, but it's size. The default typefaces are not a problem (for me anyway), and I agree it's possibly too tweaky to allow users to select any weird font they desire. However, I thought the customisation that was possible worked very well indeed -- much better than most apps. A nice way to personalise things to exactly how you want.

BUT, I find the size of the font too small in the Cirrus dialogs. It's smaller than all my other applications, menu fonts, icon fonts, etc. Where are you getting the size from? I would be more than happy if the font size could be changed (within sensible limits) and leave the typeface to be the defaults you mention.

[Tim]

BUT, I find the size of the font too small in the Cirrus dialogs. It's smaller than all my other applications, menu fonts, icon fonts, etc.

That sounds odd! On my XP system, Cirrus dialog fonts are exactly the same as those in MS Word 2002, Firefox, IE7, TortoiseSVN, etc, etc. Could you send us a screenshot of dialogs from Cirrus and another app?

[James Clark]

Actually, the size IS the same as some other apps. But, it seems smaller because most of the apps I use actually have larger fonts in their dialogs. Comparing IE7 with Cirrus and both are the same.

I don't use IE7, Word or Firefox so I don't normally see those menus. I actually modded my copy of Tortoise SVN to increase the font size because it was too small to work with comfortably!

Older style apps also have a bigger font size by default (and a different font), which also contributes to making Cirrus fonts seem smaller.

I can certainly live with Cirrus as-is because the dialogs are not something you need to go into very often. I just think it's nice when you can go beyond the "recommended" to make it a bit better. And tweaking the font improves usability -- you can tweak all the fonts in the main view, why not in the dialogs?

[Michael Bulgrien]

James,

Why not configure your windows environment to use a larger dialog font size across the board. Sounds like that is what you want. Open your display settings \ Appearance \ Advanced, then change the Message Box font and/or font size.

[Zoë]

Michael's suggestion is what I'd recommend too, with the caveat that Cirrus doesn't currently follow the message box font. That should be changed in the next release.

[James Clark]

Michael,

I already have the message box font set a bit larger, but that doesn't seem to affect Cirrus (nor lots of other applications, actually). As Chris mentions if this is fixed in the next release to follow the Message Box font, that would be just great .

[Pete]

The font in dialog boxes seems to be using the setting from Windows now with build 443. This is nice because I use a 1600 x 1200 display and the font was previously too small for me.

My only request is that there be a horizontal splitter in many of the dialogs. Two examples are the Home Page and FTP Profiles. There is a lot of unused space in the list of sessions / list of profiles. I'd prefer to be able to shrink that width with a splitter so that I can quickly access all of the settings tabs at once without needing to scroll the tabs (see screenshot).

Not quite as nice but still a fine alternative is if the tabs automatically scrolled to the left when I click on the leftmost tab (when other tabs are hidden to the left of that). This behavior works fine when clicking on the rightmost tab, but not the leftmost.

[Aaron]

Windows Behavior

Hello Pete,

Thanks for the suggestions (re-sizing splitter to give tabs more space, and auto-centering as you click through the tabs).

We currently use a Windows control, which do not seem to behave well if you set your font higher than expected. Adding a splitter would also require us to replace the tab control with a custom one that would take advantage of it. Do you know of any example programs in your large text environment that behave/scale well?

[Tim]

The font in dialog boxes seems to be using the setting from Windows now with build 443. This is nice because I use a 1600 x 1200 display and the font was previously too small for me.

Have you considered selecting a proportionally-spaced font for your Message Box font? Perhaps you really like the look of Courier, but it consumes a lot of horizontal space for its height, causing scaling problems in dialogs. I'd suggest trying Verdana (assuming you don't like Tahoma or MS Sans Serif).

[Michael Bulgrien]

Is there a reason why the FTP Profiles dialog could not be made to be resizable? That would allow a user to adjust the size of the dialog to work with their font of choice and will not require a redesign of the dialog itself.

[Tim]

The dialogs are already scaled based on the size of the Message Box font. If you look at Pete's screenshot, you'll see that his dialog is much larger than yours. The problem is that the scaling is based on font height rather than width, and a string is typically much longer in Courier than a non-fixed-width font of the same height.

[Pete]

Do you know of any example programs in your large text environment that behave/scale well?

Most of the programs that I use "cheat" by hardcoding Arial and ignoring my specified system-wide font.

On the other hand, I use a few programs that handle this quite nicely: OpenOffice, Firefox/Thunderbird, Pidgin. Hmm, it seems that the open-source projects are good about this, perhaps because their products have to work on so many different platforms and perhaps because they have so many developers that they have the resources to work on such things.

For BC/Cirrus, this is not a major problem for me because I don't use the settings tabs very often, I just think that it would be nice to have more flexibility in this regard if you ever find an easy way to implement it.

On the other hand, I'm using XP now and I know that Vista has features to help people who use large fonts on large displays. I don't have Vista to test this, but maybe the point will be moot after everyone upgrades.

Adding a splitter would also require us to replace the tab control with a custom one [...]

I was asking for a splitter between the listbox and everything to the right of the listbox, so I don't understand why the tab control itself has to change, but of course you know better than I.

Have you considered selecting a proportionally-spaced font for your Message Box font?

Thanks for the suggestion, Tim, but I can read fixed-width fonts much more easily on my display than proportional fonts, so for me the pros outweigh the cons.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Pete,

Maybe you'd be interested in this font. It's not perfect. The author applied an anti-alias "smoothing" effect that takes away the crispness of Courier New, but the dimensions may be nicer for use as a dialog font:

Courier Condensed