Add UI Scaling

[surfacist]

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!

[Swandive stream]

While you're here, can you please ask the to add UI text scaling? It's too small for me to read easily :magnifying_glass_tilted_left:

[Jessica McMillan]

Hello,

While there has been some conversations in this thread through the years I wanted to get an updated impression with the new UI and since I believe the original post was done prior to OS scaling being supported.

I know while OS scaling is an option, I have heard people having mixed opinions of that style. Why does OS scaling fail to meet your needs? Is it because you do not want other applications to also be scaled?

@defaultlyi3hd2g188g requested that the version of scaling that should be available in AE should match Adobe Illustrator. Is that how others in this thread would like this implemented? Here is the example, of Ai's scaling which allows for the OS scaling to be managed at the application level instead of or in combination with the OS scaling:

Do you find some areas of the UI text size harder to deal with than others? When the UI is scaled via OS scaling, are there parts of that is undesirable/desirable for how you envision UI text scaling to work? 

I have also moved the continued discussion to: Add UI Scaling - Adobe Community - 14274714 as I believe this original post existed prior to OS scaling support and might have been a request for that at the time.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. 

All the best,
Jessica
AE Engineering

[Jessica McMillan]

Hello @Swandive stream. and @2Majoecober 

Thank you for your request. I know while OS scaling is an option, I have heard people having mixed opinions of that style. Why does OS scaling fail to meet your needs? Is it because you do not want other applications to also be scaled?

For example, Ai has scaling as an option in their preferences and it scales the whole UI of the application:

Additional do you find some areas of the UI text size harder to deal with than others? When the UI is scaled via OS scaling, are there parts of that is undesirable/desirable for how you envision UI text scaling to work? 

We do have this discussion, which was pulled over from our old forums, which was posted prior to OS scaling and had an update posted to it which mentions OS scaling being available. Happy to revive this thread for a conversation or discuss there (and I just posted a similar post to that thread to get feedback). https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-ideas/how-to-increase-ui-font-size-in-after-effects/idi...

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. 

All the best,
Jessica 
AE Engineering

[Swandive stream]

Hello Jessica,
So what I mean is that the text in the panels, layers, and so on is very tiny.

Changing the text scaling in Windows has little to no effect on this. In rare cases where Adobe software has this option it is usually quite limited either having only the options of tiny or enormous, or tiny and almost as tiny.

It is hard to get a good idea of the size from a screen shot but I find the UI font size to be roughly comparable to ingredients lists on food products. I do need new glasses but regardless this has been a problem for a while and could make the software unusable for anyone with poorer vision.

I have just set Photoshop ui font size to the largest and it's not that big. Ideally there should be a slider (maybe with text field similar to Layer Styles options in Photoshop?) that allows the user to scale it from the smallest to so large that the panels can barely fit into the screen.

To give a comparison, Blender (which is free) Allows users to set the font to be as large as 20pt. My eyesight isn't quite that bad but you get the idea. Adobe software is falling quite behind in terms accessibility in this regard unfortunately.

If I make the OS scaling too big it does turn to cause other issues so it's best if Adobe Software is configured independently.

See examples in Blender below.

Thank you

[jackthegiantkiller]

Jessica, you are right, we don't want to have to change our monitor resolution every time we need to use an Adobe app. Almost every single app I am using outside the Adobe universe has the ability to adjust UI font size, it should honestly be an embarrassment to your company that you have ignored accessibility needs for people with vision issues for so long, shoving out this half-finished Spectrum AI and undoing the only hack we had that helped.

[Jessica McMillan]

Hello @Swandive stream and @jackthegiantkiller,

Do you prefer PS's version of scaling to the one offered in Illustrator? For transparency, the Illustrator version is one that could be implemented fairly quickly, as that uses the existing OS scaling support where everything becomes larger or smaller based on scaling. Something more in line with PS or Blender, where just the font could be adjusted, would require more work due to how the controls are sized and layed out in relation to eachother today.

Would you both mind if I took this subsection of the thread on sizing and move it to the other discussion? That way we can continue the discussion and get input additionally from those that have long been interested in such a feature.

All the best,
Jessica
AE Engineering 

[jackthegiantkiller]

If moving this to another forum will expedite things then I'm on board! Appreciate the response.

As to what version of UI scaling to use, it's hard to say. The Photoshop version for Mac give you no option for UI Scaling (it's greyed out) except a preference to "Scale UI to Font", which barely makes a dent in the scale on my 4K monitor at "Large" but its better than nothing.

The Illustrator version works better in that you can really blow up the UI as big or small as you want, although it scales both the UI panels and the UI fonts locked together which isn't ideal but I'll take it. The UI panels and the UI font really should scale independently of one another across the board on all Adobe apps. Frankly, the AdobeCleanFontSize hack worked so much better than either of these options!

[Jessica McMillan]

I have moved/merged some recent discussions that have occured off of the new UI announcement into this thread. The recent discussion is talking about what type of scaling would be helpful. One being like Illustrator, another being font only. 

The Illustrator style of scaling uses the OS scaling ability under the hood so all UI elements get uniformly scaled. 

The second option discussed of font scaling is a bit harder since many things are designed to be relationally sized and positioned, but I would still like to discuss it and how the old debug database flag helped or didn't help in this area.

Lastly, I did read over this thread, and smooth scaling is a harder problem as anything not drawn on a whole pixel becomes slightly fuzzy due to antialiasing. You could round, but then there is fallout for how to adjust the size/position of relational items to not make the whole UI become out of alignment. 

I appreciate your feedback and patiance. Looking forward to the conversation and potential solutions.

All the best,
Jessica
AE Engineering

[surfacist]

Jessica, I really appreciate your time and attention to this issue.

I would advocate for the Illustrator-style unform scale solution as ideal. While reading fonts is certainly a problem, ticking the small boxes and viewing the icons next to the layer names is also problematic, and the UI feels more familiar and faster/easier to move around when it scales uniformly, instead of just the fonts scaling, which changes the proportions of the layout.

I feel having a couple of stepped options would work fine, if that works around the antialiasing problem. Small, Medium, Large would probably be fine, but it is quite valuable to me to be able to fine-tune the appearance of the UI, so certainly the more fine-tuning that can be allowed the better. 

Again thank you for taking this up, on behalf of my eyes. 

Jon

[Swandive stream]

@Jessica McMillan

(I can't find an inline reply function on here)

I'm using Illustrator 2025 and only see Small or Large options for the slider. It doesn't have to be exactly like Blender does it, but a notched slider with scale options would work. Also, certain windows like Preferences need to be resizable as on larger scales the bottom is cut off. There is a large grey area without contents that could be resized without issue.

But something like you showed in your screenshot would work fine. After Effects is probably the worst in terms of accessibility with the lack of UI scaling (I can barely see what I'm doing). Given that anyone with less than 20:20 vision would likely struggle to see it, it does mean that a large chunk of people (especially older) would find it difficult or impossible to use the software so I would be inclined to make this a priority.

To use a metaphor it's like having a large shop with interesting products for sale and nicely styled shop, but the only entrance is a catflap that nobody can get through (except cats). It doesn't matter if you extend the shop into the basement to include more stock, when nobody can get in.

[Danielle_Agriopoulos3328]

As I'm getting older, I'm having to squint at all the UI text in the program, and it's really hard on the eyes. Please, please, please make it so you can have a program setting to set the UI text size to be small, medium, or large (maybe small is 8pt, medium is 12 or 14pt, and large is 18pt). It looks like 6 or 5pt to me right now on a 27" monitor and it's driving me crazy. I think this can be considered an acessibility issue.

[jojo mcfly]

No, OS text scaling was supported a long time ago, and it's always been completely insufficient.  It's honestly insane that this is even being discussed still.  Just get a 4k monitor and look for yourself.  It's absurd.

[jojo mcfly]

Stuff like this is the reason I cancelled my sub.  Where is all the money going?  FIX IT.