font size in "documentation" tool view

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wednesday July 13 2016 10:30:27 Jens Reuterberg wrote:

> (and tbh from our POV its mostly the terminal and Kate that we are overly 
> bothered with since those are the ones people see directly where you can't 
> assume users feel knowledgeble enough to edit the font)

Terminal users wouldn't be knowledgeable enough to change a font setting? Maybe that goes for today's xterm font users where customising the font indeed requires a bit of behind-the-scenes knowledge, but with apps like Konsole? 

Golden rule that even VGD members should be aware of: never UNDERestimate your users. Just give them an interface that invites exploring it, for instance to discover how to tune it to ones liking and needs.

Unless you're targeting kindergarten or 4th age users of course.

> I mean since we are editing it one pt bigger I am sure we will get complaints 
> about it being "too big by default" too, it's just that keeping it the same as 
> the rest of the fonts make sense from a logical POV.

For a DEFAULT, yes ... and even then only if the intended use cases correspond to the kind of use cases for which the default was conceived.

This particular case seems to concern Qt's documentation, which has of course been designed without any care for KDE's default font specs. I *presume* that the documentation renderer takes the current font spec (size) and uses it to tune the fonts specified in the documentation. Without something like a "minimum size readable font" setting like Chrome has that can lead to all kinds of results.
I haven't noticed issues with too small fonts in the documentation myself, partly because I avoid using the documentation toolview (I do use the documentation popups), partly because I don't have crazy-high-res screens and I like to avoid wasting space.

I *did* notice that Qt's documentation doesn't always behave as expected, esp. in fixed font blocks like code snippets. At my font setting (11pt IIRC) I see pixelated glyphs until I zoom in a few steps. That's surprising because I use Freetype and FontCOnfig with the Infinality patches which everywhere else give better rendering than even Apple's CoreText gives.

R.