To All Devs: please cater to BIG SCREENS!!!

[emdot_ambient]

...When I record Drums...When it comes to eqing and mixing the drums I'll have most every plugin visible so I can quickly tweak the sound...

Point taken. I never record live audio, I'm 100% MIDI. But even still, the EQs and compressors I use don't really require as much screen real estate. For some reason, I aslo don't tend to mind smaller interfaces on those kinds of plug-ins. It's synths I'm mostly concerned with.

[tony tony chopper]

Would it be possible to allow the user to select the Font color along with the Background color?

FL9 will have a special color menu where you can pick 'nice' colors, and custom colors will also be clipped, so you won't be able to pick bright green mixer tracks (as I've often seen) anymore.

[ugo]

I haven't read the whole thread yet, so I apologize if this has already been covered. I just showed up and saw some of the Ogun discussion so I thought I'd offer my $0.02. Also, I should preface this by saying I mean no offense by any of this. I'm just offering my observations and friendly suggestions.

Here are a few ways to make small fonts easier to read:

- Use pixel fonts...no anti aliasing. When a font gets small enough in an image, the half-tone/transparency needed to make corner look rounded can make it appear slightly fuzzy.

- Use slightly higher contrast on the text (not the whole gui) than you might otherwise expect you would need.

- Sometimes smaller anti aliased fonts can benefit from the following Photoshop sharpening trick (available from version 7 on):
1) Create an duplicate layer that as the text flattened on the background
2) With the extra layer selected, choose filter/other/high pass/ and give it a radius of 0.3, then accept the change. Your duplicate layer should now be gray with only faint outlines visible.
3) In the layers palette, go to the blending options dropdown (by default it says "normal") and select vivid light.
4) Use the opacity control to adjust the degree of the sharpening effect so it's not too crispy.

By the way, this Photoshop trick works great for any photograph you have to reduce in size and resolution for the web. It can bring back a ton of lost detail and tighten the image back up. But if you try it you'll see it can also help with gui text.

Anyway, since Ogun is being discussed...I believe the following elements may be combining to cause the text on the gui to be harder to read than on some other guis: Grey on grey, tiny, narrow, anti aliased fonts with a 1 pixel kerning.

Working with small fonts can present readability challenges even in the best of times but sometimes they are a necessary evil. However, having the fonts narrow exacerbates the issue because there is less of the individual letters for the eye to lock on to. Having them very close together can exacerbate this. Anti aliasing used for rounded edges smooths things out but on tiny fonts it can sometimes give the impression of looking slightly fuzzy. Grey on Grey can be great but it's also a tough combo to dial in because to little contrast can make the letters seem to blend in too much.

When you put them all together, you have the potential of running into a situation that is similar to the effect you get with printed media where dots or lines of alternating colors are used to create the effect of a solid third color (eg. alternating black and white gives the impression of gray when viewed at a distance.) Everything starts to blend together because the eye has too hard of a time quickly identifying the edges of individual characters, thus making the fonts harder to read.

If the fonts were pixel fonts (no anti aliasing applied), 1 pixel wider, and were slightly brighter, I think Ogun's gui would probably be a bit easier to read. Just my own thoughts though. Your mileage may vary.

[Teksonik]

...
So having a huge synth GUI, even if it eats up most of my screen, would make preset creation much easier. It's not like I'm going to be doing a lot of live knob twiddling directly from the GUI.

The flip side to that is that there are a lot of people who do live knob twiddling and record the automation.

With a mouse. One knob at a time. And if you want any kind of precision, that means one synth at a time. How many of you really record live knob tweaks from multiple synths at one time? I'm sure some people do that, but some people also like Coldplay. There's no accounting for some people.

Playing in a live setting, now that's completely different. But in the studio, I think most people would tend to do all edits one synth at a time. I could be wrong.

I've got Midi controllers with lots of knobs and sliders and I've never tried to automate more than one synth at a time. Is that even possible in FL in realtime? Can you assign the same controller/CC# to different parameters on on differents synths and contol them at the same time in FL live? I don't know never tried it.

[Teksonik]

Would it be possible to allow the user to select the Font color along with the Background color?

FL9 will have a special color menu where you can pick 'nice' colors, and custom colors will also be clipped, so you won't be able to pick bright green mixer tracks (as I've often seen) anymore.

Ok that sounds good.........sort of. Who decides what are "Nice" colors? Please tell me they won't be the Easter Candy colors available for Piano Roll Note colors now.

Custom colors will be "clipped"? Who cares if someone wants to use bright green mixer tracks? I wouldn't but why should you care what colors we use? So in other words we get "custom" colors but only from a palette you choose? What parts will we be able to "customize"? Mixer Strip Labels? Piano Roll Notes? Playlist Blocks?

[Teksonik]

...When I record Drums...When it comes to eqing and mixing the drums I'll have most every plugin visible so I can quickly tweak the sound...

Point taken. I never record live audio, I'm 100% MIDI. But even still, the EQs and compressors I use don't really require as much screen real estate. For some reason, I aslo don't tend to mind smaller interfaces on those kinds of plug-ins. It's synths I'm mostly concerned with.

I agree. When I'm creating presets I would mind if a synth's gui took up the whole screen but that wouldn't be practical in other uses and impossible to fit all screen sizes/resolutions.

[tony tony chopper]

- Use pixel fonts...no anti aliasing. When a font gets small enough in an image, the half-tone/transparency needed to make corner look rounded can make it appear slightly fuzzy.

I think the opposite (I also hate that new meaning of 'pixel art' btw. In the past pixel art only referred to pixellated art that would NOT look pixellated)

plus, tricky letters like V, W, Y just won't work with plain pixels

[mystran]

I think you could increase the size by a considerable percentage and still have it fit even on the smallest of monitors/resolution.

I want a plugin's UI to be fully visible along with FL's toolbars at 1024x768 (& when FL started I wanted the same at 800x600).
First because if it's 1 standard res under the one I use (1280x1024), it's surely still used a lot, second because I also think of tablet PC's or rotating monitors that can be used in portrait mode, thus I consider it should work for a square of the minimum size (1024x1024).

WAITT!!! My laptop screen is 1280x800 (which is a pretty typical widescreen laptop resolution unless you want a huge laptop). That basically means Ogun fits inside a maximized FL window (between the FL toolbars, and normal single-line Vista toolbar) only when the onscreen keyboard at the bottom of the plugin window is closed. With the keyboard open, I have no reasonable way to reach the preset-menus at the bottom..

That said, I can live with that quite fine (it fits, even if barely, and I don't need onscreen keyboards for absolutely anything), just don't make anything any bigger.

[Teksonik]

With the keyboard open, I have no reasonable way to reach the preset-menus at the bottom..

That said, I can live with that quite fine (it fits, even if barely, and I don't need onscreen keyboards for absolutely anything), just don't make anything any bigger.

So in other words everything should be wider and less tall now that a lot of monitors/laptops have wide screen format.

[mystran]

- Use pixel fonts...no anti aliasing. When a font gets small enough in an image, the half-tone/transparency needed to make corner look rounded can make it appear slightly fuzzy.

I think the opposite (I also hate that new meaning of 'pixel art' btw. In the past pixel art only referred to pixellated art that would NOT look pixellated)

plus, tricky letters like V, W, Y just won't work with plain pixels

Agree. There's a certain range of font sizes (approximately 8 to 12 or so) where a properly hinted font designed for small sizes (say, something like Verdana) can look easier to read without anti-aliasing (though sub-pixel rendering on TFTs still makes sense). Any bigger or smaller than that, or a font that wasn't designed to sit nicely in the pixel grid (very few are), or a font that isn't hinted properly at small sizes, and you really just have to anti-alias.

As for pixel art, the most beautiful "pixel art" always was the low-res 256 stuff in some of the most beautiful games of the time: if you didn't specifically look at the pixels, it'd look as smooth (if not smoother) than the smoothest true-color high-res stuff. As a kid I ever read tutorials about how to manually anti-alias curved borders, and I remember at least one what went so far as to suggest adding (again manually!) some ringing (like a steep anti-aliasing filter would do) around the border in order to emphasize contrast and sharpen the border, while still keeping it perfectly smooth. And all this with a 256 color palette, where you might have maybe 8 different shades of green, total!

[Doug B]

[quote="tony tony chopperI have no idea what kind of eyesight problem is linked to contrast, though. I would rather suspect a lot of people have bright windows behind their monitors, reflecting on them?[/quote]

I also suspect that a lot of people never adjust their brightness and contrast controls. Even fewer calibrate their screen with devices like a Huey or ColourMonkee unless they also do graphics.

[tony tony chopper]

can look easier to read without anti-aliasing

But that totally depends on the font rasterizer. For ex, the one in Win9x (the old before cleartype) would make any font blurry at small sizes. Cleartype is not only a color trick but also a better rasterizer and will make this better.

However the labels we're talking about are hand-drawn anyway - not made from outlines. That includes mine and the NI ones too (I'm pretty sure they were manually smoothed).

[mystran]

However the labels we're talking about are hand-drawn anyway - not made from outlines. That includes mine and the NI ones too (I'm pretty sure they were manually smoothed).

Are we talking about the 5x3 text that I found on some IL plugins now that I started looking for them? Never realized it was that small, until I actually took the laptop screen closer to my eyes and counted the pixels.. so guess you did a rather reasonable job.

edit: oh and personally I've used some of that stuff on a 24" 1920x1440 screen with no problem whatsoever, so not sure what it all has to do with big screens.

[tony tony chopper]

Are we talking about the 5x3 text that I found on some IL plugins

yes, hand-drawn but so are those NI (most likely bitmap fonts)
on some other UI's in the bitmap I see badly probably realtime rasterized ones, as well as the not-so-good photoshop rasterizer


Best font rasterizer ever here, btw:
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_ ... TERIZATION
I don't think a rasterizer will ever do better.

[mystran]

Best font rasterizer ever here, btw:
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_ ... TERIZATION
I don't think a rasterizer will ever do better.

Hmmh.. haven't tried the font rasterizer but at least anti-grain vector rasterizer does a reasonably decent job (which reminds I should fix gamma correction in my own) and there's some really cool ideas on the page. That's what I love about AGG.. I don't use AGG code for anything, but the site explains a lot of stuff about how to draw graphics properly.

Could actually try and see if I could reproduce some of that stuff..