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surfacist
surfacist
Participant
January 26, 2014
Open for Voting

Add UI Scaling

  • January 26, 2014
  • 24 replies
  • 8392 views

The After Effects user interface is very diffuclt to work with at 4k, even on very large monitors. To wit, on a 32" monitor at 3840x2160, the text of a layer name is 1/16 of an inch tall– 8 layers are packed into each vertical inch. The Console Debug "AdobeCleanFontSize" workaround has no effect on some aspects of the interface, such as layer names, text in effect control panes, etc. This undersized UI poses legibility challenges, and slows workflow by requiring an extrordinary level of pointing accuracy to click on things.

 

Illustrator solves this problem elegantly by adding a "UI scaling" slider control to the "User Interface" pref pane. Photoshop solves this problem a bit less elegantly but still effectively with a "UI Font Size" and a "Scale UI to Font" option.  I suggest the AE team adopts one of these appoaches.  I'd also suggets that this be a very high priority. It is necessary for most AE artists to work at 4k these days, making this an annoyance that I deal with every single day. I feel this is the most glaring feature oversight in AE currently.

 

Thank you for your consideration, AE dev team. And if you are a fellow AE user reading this and you have the same issue be sure to upvote, because apparently upvoted posts in this forum is what passes as a feature request/bug report nowadays.

 

Thanks!

    24 replies

    Show previous replies
    A
    avanrossum
    Participant
    December 9, 2023

    People have been asking for this for at least 13 years. I doubt it will ever show up, but we can still hope

      Shebbe
      Community Expert
      ShebbeCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      December 3, 2023

      I would also like to see a fully smooth scalable UI via a slider. It would probably require a redesign of the way their UI functions though... don't see it happening very soon.

       

      It does scale along with OS scaling however so you can use that as a workaround for now although all your software will be affected by it.

        Swandive stream
        Swandive stream
        Inspiring
        April 24, 2023

        As of current the font size is so small that I can't see what I am doing easily. It's considerably prohibitive when I'm struggling to read the layer names and other elements (24" screen). This is a common issue for users.

          R
          Community Expert
          Rick GerardCommunity Expert
          Community Expert
          April 25, 2023

          This is a very common feature request. It has my vote.

            K
            kumashu
            Participant
            January 26, 2014

            Hi there.

            I have a lil problem. I have high rez monitor and using AE CS6 but I couldn't find about change UI font size menu.

            Is that possible? My OS windows 7.

            Best,

            Kuma

              V
              Veronica Sargent
              Participant
              January 14, 2020

              Hello. So, I have a Surface Book 2. I used to use After Effects CS6 on my other computer which I believe was like an HP Note or something like that. After Effects opened fine on that HP laptop, but when I opened it up on Surface Book 2, the layout/workspace was extremely small. I looked around for an answer to my problem but couldn't find it anywhere. I came across this article and I thought that all hope was lost. But, after a while of racking my brain to try and figure it out! I got it!

               

              So, since my text was super small. This is what I did.

              I went to the application that was on my desktop

               

              I right clicked it and went to "Properties"

               

              Then this pops up:

               

               

              So then I went to the compatability tab and I checkmarked "disable fullscreen optimizations".

               

               

              But even when I had that clicked, nothing changed.

               

              So, then I saw the option of "Change high DPI settings" and this pops up:

               

               

              It had different settings before, but this is what I changed it to. If you copy your settings with what I did to mine, I'm pretty certain that it will help! 😄

               

              Mine went from looking like this:

               

               

              To looking like this:

               

               

              So yeah! I hope this helps anyone who stumbles across it~ 🙂

               

              Also, I had tried doing the display settings with my computer and change the resolution and all that, but that only ended up making my entire computer look out of shape because it made everything look humongous and it didn't help After Effects look that much bigger. But yeah! I'm glad that I found the solution to this! ^.^ :DDDD

                C
                camimaslaton
                Participant
                March 13, 2021

                Thank you Veronica, the only post that actually helped 🙂

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