Emulator Issues #11822
open
UI - OSD text is too small and not changeable.
0%
Description
In the current versions of Dolphin that use the Qt interface, the text that appears when "Show input display" and "Show frame counter" are enabled under the "Movie" tab is too small and the font cannot be changed. In the older WX versions of Dolphin, the font was bigger, but the text size, font, and color could not be changed. This is an issue because the current font is too small, and the number 0 looks very similar to the number 8.
Ideally, it would be possible to customize the font, the text size, the color, the placement, and choose to have the text in bold, italics, etc., similar to something like Microsoft Word. As of now, only the placement of the text can be changed.
If the text cannot be made customizable, I think it would be good to increase the default text size and possibly change the font so the number 0 and 8 look more different.
I'm currently using Dolphin 5.0-10121 but I believe the issue is still present in the current versions of Dolphin.
Updated by JosJuice over 5 years ago
- Subject changed from UI - Text in the input display and frame counter area is too small and not changeable. to UI - OSD text is too small and not changeable.
Updated by Stenzek over 5 years ago
Which OS/resolution/scaling settings are you using? The size of everything in the OSD should be scaled relative to your system's DPI/scale. Perhaps we're not detecting it correctly.
Updated by FitterSpace over 5 years ago
Stenzek wrote:
Which OS/resolution/scaling settings are you using? The size of everything in the OSD should be scaled relative to your system's DPI/scale. Perhaps we're not detecting it correctly.
I am using Windows 10 64-bit with the default (100%) system scaling. I am also using a 2560 x 1440 display.
Here is a screenshot of what the OSD looks like when the game is played at 2x native resolution with window sizing set to automatically adjust window size:
https://gyazo.com/0cf97b9d3efd0f4d89fc2f0148047d21
The text is not so small that it's impossible to read, but I think something should be done about the number 0 and 8 looking similar. I captured this screenshot on frame 6,180 to demonstrate that. If the text could be adjusted, I would make the text size about the same size as the in-game text that reads "0:09:05" or "Release the lockdown" in the top corners of the screen.
Here is a screenshot of the same information in the old WX interface. I much prefer the newer user interface, but the text size in the older versions is a lot better for me.
https://gyazo.com/9d7a6b247c2fea0d99d7705b2ed0fd12
Updated by Techjar over 5 years ago
0 and 8 look pretty different to me, it must be hard to tell on the small pixel size of your monitor. Perhaps you should increase the system DPI scaling, as I can imagine text in other applications being hard to read as well. High DPI displays aren't really good for use at 100% scale.
Updated by FitterSpace over 5 years ago
Techjar wrote:
0 and 8 look pretty different to me, it must be hard to tell on the small pixel size of your monitor. Perhaps you should increase the system DPI scaling, as I can imagine text in other applications being hard to read as well. High DPI displays aren't really good for use at 100% scale.
Even when I drag it to my 1920 x 1080 display, the 0 and 8 still look too similar, especially since the 0 has a dot in the middle. I don't have any problems reading text in other programs or on websites. I've considered setting my windows scaling to 125% but it made other unrelated things look a lot worse. The normal text looks okay, it's good enough. But I often get 0 and 8 confused because they are too small and too similar looking to distinguish easily.
Updated by Billiard26 over 5 years ago
- Status changed from New to Questionable
The OSD text is about the same size as your titlebar text. That seems reasonable to me.
Updated by Techjar over 5 years ago
Well the font is just ImGui's built-in. We can't change it right now, as we tried to and ran into a roadblock with ImGui being unable to correctly load most of the fonts we tested. The only thing that can be changed here is the scaling, which is currently only determined by the DPI scale as seen by Qt.
You could force a different scale only for Dolphin using the QT_SCALE_FACTOR variable set via a batch script or something. I'm not sure if adding a separate OSD scale option is worth it.
Updated by Stenzek over 5 years ago
- Issue type changed from Bug to Feature request
Yeah, the main issue here is the bitmap font used in ImGui, scaling that to a non-integer value won't look very good. Also for what it's worth, only the D3D11 backend previously used that font, the OpenGL backend used a smaller/fixed-width size. Since the videocommon unification, all backends use the same OSD, rendered by ImGui.
Loading custom fonts is something we'll need in the future for internationalization of OSD strings, but as Techjar said, there are issues with the ImGui font renderer which are currently preventing this.
For now, I'm going to put this down as a feature request. If you want to increase the font size yourself, you can do so by replacing the line at https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/1bd8f033627ceef8479cb549447782ae860574c2/Source/Core/DolphinQt/MainWindow.cpp#L171 with wsi.render_window_scale = 1.5f; or whatever value you like, but be aware it might look blurry.