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!

[Snehal339946522laz]

In the interim, is there any way to make the debug command AdobeCleanFont or whatever it was called come back while you're fixing the problem? Because I could at least get a couple of point sizes out of it to make my day to day incrementally easier?

[surfacist]

@Jessica McMillan the addition of an Illustrator-style interface scaling option would be tremendous. I cannot overstate how important and valuable a change would be. I have been running After Effects professionally as my primary software tool for 19 years now (transitioned from Flash in '06!) and as I get older, this is slowly but surely becoming a legitimate accessability problem for me. Thank you again for your attention to this issue. If specific feedback on a beta would be helpful, please share your needs by posting here or emailing dirctly. I am usually too deep in production to mess around with beta versions, but for this, I will make an exception 🙂

[Jessica McMillan]

@Snehal339946522laz, unfortunately the code paths that were previously being overriden to allow the debug database access to that UI are not available any more. There is future work being done in this space at an app wide level, but unfortunately no quick "return" for that previously used entry. 

@surfacist Will post here and ping you directly when that enters beta. Thanks for your willingness to give it a try when it is available and to provide feedback. I expect some of the feedback we might be looking for is in the best way to display options and give granularity. For example, it is a multiplier value, and while on Windows OS that looks like 50%, 125%, 150%, 200% etc, we could display that as percentages, or as values like 1.5. Small changes on a value like that can be pretty dramatic, and there might be a possibility where very odd multiplers draw less cleanly (similar to if you have tried odd multipliers with Windows OS scaling). Feedback would be valuable on how fine grained this UI should allow, if we should be avoiding access to certain multipliers if the visual quality of that is less than ideal, etc.

Looking forward to getting it into all of your hands as that first step and hearing what problems it solves or doesn't solve.

Thanks again!

[Erik5ECA]

@Jessica McMillan Any chance I could get you to nudge the Photoshop team about a different but related issue they have? Photoshop brush sizes are currently tied to accessibility pointer size settings in MacOS, which means if someone, for accessibility reasons, wants a bigger mouse pointer in MacOS, the brush size is inaccuate and extremely difficult to use in Photoshop. I and others have made several inquiries for quite some time about this, and I've been told to make a feaure request. I don't think fixing a broken accessibility link should be considered a feature, I think it should be considered a bug to be fixed.

[jackthegiantkiller]

I'm sorry but this just absolutely galls me:

"The work on UI scaling had been paused, but I’m happy to share that I’ll be picking this back up in the near term."

WHY WAS IT PAUSED? For some half-baked 3D you shoehorned in while the rest of us beg and beg and beg for you to address something far more critical than AI Slop generators?