Font size (accessibility) not handled well in version 5.1

This certainly looks like unintentional behaviour / “a bug”.

KiCAD’s version info:

Application: kicad
Version: 5.1.0-060a0da~80~ubuntu18.04.1, release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.58.0 OpenSSL/1.1.0g zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.4 libpsl/0.19.1 (+libidn2/2.0.4) nghttp2/1.30.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 4.15.0-46-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.22
    Boost: 1.65.1
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.58.0
    Compiler: GCC 7.3.0 with C++ ABI 1011

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

My platform is Ubuntu 18.04 running Unity desktop.

The one thing that is particular about my setup is that I use larger menu fonts and icon sizes in the desktop setup (1.25 in this case, because the resolution is 2560x1440 — in 4k monitors I need to go as high as 1.5 to be able to read the screen text):

I suspect that the issue may be related to this. Look at these screen captures from KiCAD windows.

In the following screen capture, the text on the right-side area is the normal text size on my screen; look at how tiny the text on the left is (the list of files):

Look at the “About” window. The text at the top ((C) 1992-2019 KiCad Developers ···) and the captions in the buttons at the bottom show at normal size; look at the tiny size of the captions of the tabs, and the contents inside the tabbed area:

If I reset my desktop / display properties back to a scale factor of 1, I still see a small difference in font size, but not as bad. For example, this is one of the windows that looked particularly horrible with my original scale=1.25 settings, and it only looks slightly-odd with the scale=1 settings (one can certainly tell that the font size in the “spreadsheet” view / symbol properties is noticeably smaller; but it’s not a huge difference):

Another reason why I suspect that it may be a bug, and not intended look/behaviour, is a problem with some selection lists; for some reason, right now I can only partially reproduce the odd behaviour, but I assure you that I did not imagine it :-). Inside pcbnew, I go to the menu Place → Footprint. The list of footprints, which has a “preview” area on the right, behaves oddly. The preview on the right shows only the second time that I click on an item. For example, if I expend the section Capacitor_SMD; I click on C_0201_0603Metric and nothing shows on the right; then I click anywhere else, and click back on C_0201_0603Metric, and now the footprint shows on the right. Same for every item (well, even more oddly, there are some exceptions — for example, going line by line from C_0201 down, C_0402_1005Metric showed at the first click, and C_01005_0402Metric showed at the first click; C_1806 also showed at the first click. All of the others only show at the second click. Moving the cursor with the arrow keys makes no difference; the first time the cursor lands on an item, nothing shows; if you then do down-arrow followed by up-arrow, then the cursor lands in the item for the second time, so now the footprint shows.

The reason I suspect that this may be related to the same “alleged bug” is that at some point, the display of the list was broken. It is a bit hard to describe — it is as if the real position of the cursor and the displayed items are out-of-sync; as I move the cursor with the arrow, the display refreshes and overwrites all the area from the cursor down (because the cursor was showing, say item #5, but then when I move down, the actual selection is, say, item #8, so the list now refreshes so that from the position of the cursor down, it shows 9, 10, 11…).

This last aspect is the part that right now I cannot reproduce. However, I am 100% certain I’ve seen this on several occasions — not sure how useful this may be; perhaps other users can reproduce this behaviour?

Actually, I could finally reproduce the other glitch — the one with the footprints list. Here’s a video capture. At the end of the video, I clicked on several items to show the “only-shows-the-footprint-the-second-time-I-click-on-it” bug:

KiCAD-glitch.mkv (870.3 KB)

That footprint tree rendering bug definitely does not look right but about small fonts in project tree I’m afraid that’s shortcomings of how Linux handles fonts and scaling in general. There is no universal font scaling, at least not in X11. Wayland is more promising but it’s long ways before wide adoption.

What I do on a 4k monitor with very small pixel pitch is leave the scale slider on 1 but change default font sizes. KiCad looks great

kicad

Wayland does not play nice with kicad at this point in time. (I think the cursor warp is one of the things that would need to go for wayland to be an option.)

The bug report can be found here:


Remember to press “this bug affects me”
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Not sure whether it is already known, but the bug seems to apply to more than just the footprint viewer. See video for symbol selection — I think the bug report specifies that it is triggered when one enters some search pattern to narrow-down the list:

KiCAD-glitch-sch.mkv (483.1 KB)

Related to the “main” topic, which is the font sizes — I’m going to submit a bug report, unless you guys convince me that it’s not a bug or that there’s nothing much that the developers will do or will be able to do about it.

As much as in this thread it was pointed out that the culprit is outside of KiCAD, the thing is: this did not happen in KiCAD 5.0 — something is being done in 5.1 in a way that does not work well with whatever desktop manager or display engine, and that something was either not done in 5.0, or was done differently, in a way that worked well with the desktop or display engine.

5.1 switched to gtk3 and as such inherited the bulk of bugs that come with gtk3 themes. And there is no going back so I’m not sure if developers would be able to do anything about it but it doesn’t hurt to file a bug anyway.

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