[mythtv-users] Merge of OSD and Main themes causes WAF to Plummet

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon Feb 28 19:44:40 UTC 2011


On 02/28/2011 02:08 PM, Dan Armbrust wrote:
> I don't doubt that there are many difficult areas, which will horribly
> break if fonts get too large in the current system.  But really, this
> should only be impacting areas of the GUI that have hardcoded, static
> text in a fixed size area.  Any area of the GUI that has dynamic, show
> generated text already has to have a way to deal with text larger than
> the allotted area.

They all have that functionality.  *Please* try the example I gave.  You 
will see the cutdown text all over the place.  If you can live with it, 
then enjoy.  Otherwise, you'll actually learn that we're not just lazy.

> There are many areas that should not care one lick about the font size.
>
> For example, a list of episodes.  The only effect making the font
> bigger for a list of episodes is that the scrolling list would get
> longer, and a couple more letters would be chopped off the right edge,
> if the episode name is too long.  Which it already has to do if the
> episode name is too long.

And the vertical size would need to change, which means that instead of 
fitting 7 episodes vertically in the list, we now fit 6, which means 
that the always-centered cursor that's in the 4th from the top and 4th 
from the bottom slot is now either 3 from the top and 4 from bottom or 3 
from bottom and 4 from top.  And now that we can't fit 7 episodes in 
there, we end up with some extra space, so what do we do with it?  Do we 
try to make all the 6 episodes listed use more space each (and then 
throw off alignment of items within each episode "button"?  Do we put 
padding at the top and bottom of the screen?  Or do we put padding in 
between each episode?  And with that padding in there, what happens when 
we have room to add 2 pixels between each episode, but then only one 
pixel between the bottom 2 episodes?  Or if we need to make room for 7 
pixels with 6 items in the list?  All of a sudden, MythTV's moving stuff 
around is making it difficult

Then, when users tell us that there's tons of wasted space, what do we 
do?  After all, the theme author wrote the theme to use 7 episodes 
vertically, and it looks /perfect/ on his screen.  And now some user is 
saying that there are only 6 episodes vertically and it looks like 
there's space for a 7th.  So now MythTV's 
"auto-theme-things-differently-from-how-the-theme-designer-specified" is 
making it hard for the themer to figure out why people are complaining, 
because the theme--*as designed*--works properly.

And the important thing here is that I'm not just making up "what ifs."  
These are the actual problems the developers discovered when they *did* 
write the code to do what you say is so easy.  The developers and the 
themers couldn't come up with an approach that just worked.  So, it was 
decided that we'll either require themers to do what we can't make the 
computers do or we'll wait until someone comes up with a plan (and code) 
that does the right thing and doesn't break stuff.

Yes.  Let me say that again.  Some of our developers have actually 
written the code to do this type of thing and found out it doesn't 
work.  We're not just lazy.  We're not just pretending we know what's 
happening.  We're speaking from experience.

> It seems that at a minimum, the font sizes could be increased, as
> desired by the user, up until the point where the font increase will
> cause something to not fit in the area allotted by the theme.  The
> font would be effectively capped dynamically at a particular level,
> rather than simply specified in the theme.  Heck, this would even fix
> broken themes.... If a theme specified a 14pt font, but in this
> particular field, the label only fits if we use a 13pt font -
> automatically set it to 13.
>
> In my particular setup, 99% of the text that I want bigger could be
> made bigger without breaking anything.

So you say.  Try it and see.  It's simple to change a font size.  
/Anyone/ can do it easily.  I even gave specific instructions in my last 
post.  Repeating here since you cut it out of your reply:
----
it's as simple as opening base.xml and osd.xml in your favorite text 
editor and changing the pixelsize values--or for some themes, the size 
values--for fontdef elements
----

>    Especially in the OSD area.
> And it isn't like I want to go from 10pt font to 24pt.  I want to go
> up to about 12.  I shouldn't have to learn how to write (or edit) a
> theme to do this.

Yeah, because changing *2* numbers in an XML file is just /so/ terribly 
difficult.  ;)

MythTV will /not/ provide any settings that allow users to break 
themes.  Users wanting to break themes can do so with a text editor.  
That way, they are far more likely to realize that when things don't 
look right after they edit the theme, that it's because they broke the 
theme themselves.

Mike


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