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Add UI Scaling

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
January 26, 2014
16 replies
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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!

UI and UX

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Erik5ECA

Inspiring

I'd like to add my vote to the having scaling be just like in Illustrator. As many have said, we should not have to change the OS scaling just to be able to read text in an Adobe app.

Swandive stream

Inspiring

I made an example of how the UI could look. Adobe software is rather lacking when it comes to accessibility, that is visual options for increased contrast, sizes etc. I struggle to see it and someone with poorer eyesight likely would be unable to use the software. If their eyesight declines over time then they may be unable to do their job if frequently using After Effects.

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jojo mcfly

New Participant

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

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jojo mcfly

New Participant

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.

D

Danielle_Agriopoulos3328

New Participant

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.

surfacistAuthor

New Participant

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

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Jessica McMillan

Community Manager

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

All the best,Jessica McMillan - AE Engineering

napsmear

New Participant

After latest Oct update to AE 25.0 the UI labels are much harder to see now, even the icons along the bottom of the Comp and Project Panels are smaller.

also...Theme colorizer no longer works.

Swandive stream

Inspiring

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

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Jessica McMillan

Community Manager

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-p/5801657

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

All the best,
Jessica
AE Engineering

All the best,Jessica McMillan - AE Engineering

jackthegiantkiller

Inspiring

I really don't understand Adobe, what is the point of this Spectrum UI if they are not going to give us any control over the font size? They have also broken the old hack of setting the "AdobeCleanFontSize" in the AE Console, as this term no longer shows up in search. It also breaks many critical older Script UI Panels such as Keystone and Rift. Ugh...😑