Closed Bug 1453928 Opened 7 years ago Closed 7 years ago

Provide an option to increase the font size in menus,windows etc.

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Untriaged
Version:
52 Branch
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 570442

People

(Reporter: mawubigi, Unassigned)

Details

Attachments

(3 files)

smallfontscreenshot.png
47.99 KB, image/png
Details
Difference between FF59, system's font and TB font size
154.77 KB, image/png
Details
Example of tiny fonts TBird without Theme & Font functionality.
831.66 KB, image/jpeg
Details
Attached image smallfontscreenshot.png —
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 Build ID: 20180404120016 Steps to reproduce: Just open Thunderbird Actual results: There is no way to increase the font size in Tunderbird menus,windows etc. this means that for people with wide screen or impaired sight TB is unusable. There is one addon "Theme Font size changer" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/theme-font-size-changer-for-tb/which provide such feature that however breaks every regularly every 2 or 3 months (just look at the review on AMO site). Expected results: Please provide a way, as you do for the mail content, to change the size of font.
TB uses the font sizes the OS is using. How can only be TB unusable when all other system tools use the same font sizes?
I don't know on other systems but on Lubuntu (so LXDE) thunderbird's font is way smaller than the system one. Firefox has bigger fonts because I tweaked it (thanks to the built-in feature). Judging by the people reviewing "Theme Font size changer" many users don't have the same fonts of the OS or they wouldn't be using such addon (which by the way is the only solution suggested online if you want to increase the fonts in TB). The addon breaks regularly and with such small fonts for many (15.000 Theme Font size changer users) it is very problematic if you have many rss feeds or many accounts, your eyes really get tired.
Thanks for the attached image. I counted the pixels, the Text at the bottom "Los Angeles" has the same height as "Feeds" "Templates" in the TB window. So it looks to me that TB uses the system font size. I can see that the Firefox menu is bigger. You mention tweaking it? How and where? I've looked on the web for advice on how to adjust the font and found two suggestions: 1) userChrome.css 2) The add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/theme-font-size-changer-for-tb/ that you mentioned already. I started reading through the source code of the add-on and spotted this preference: layout.css.devPixelsPerPx I experimented with setting it and in the preference you can set a zoom factor. The default is -1. Setting it to 1.1 gives a slightly bigger font. WARNING: Be very careful with the values, if you set the value too big, TB will become unusable and you have to edit prefs.js manually.
As others have noted the 'Theme and Font' add-on breaks every 90 days. For anyone even slightly nearsighted (or using a laptop) Thunderbird is absolutely unusable without the ability to easily increase the font size. Mozilla must add this functionality to Thunderbird.
Have you tried setting pref layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.1 or 1.2? - See comment #4.
(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+1) from comment #7) > Have you tried setting pref layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.1 or 1.2? - See > comment #4. This won't help. Font is bigger but some content is not visible being out of window range. For instance buttons in Settings. I too would really appreciate the option to set the font size similar to "Theme Font size changer" addon.
Hmm, 1.1 works for me, panels come up bigger, I haven't seen anything being cut off.
(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+1) from comment #4) > Thanks for the attached image. I counted the pixels, the Text at the bottom > "Los Angeles" has the same height as "Feeds" "Templates" in the TB window. > So it looks to me that TB uses the system font size. I can see that the > Firefox menu is bigger. You mention tweaking it? How and where? > > I've looked on the web for advice on how to adjust the font and found two > suggestions: > 1) userChrome.css > 2) The add-on > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/theme-font-size-changer- > for-tb/ > that you mentioned already. > > I started reading through the source code of the add-on and spotted this > preference: layout.css.devPixelsPerPx > I experimented with setting it and in the preference you can set a zoom > factor. The default is -1. Setting it to 1.1 gives a slightly bigger font. > WARNING: Be very careful with the values, if you set the value too big, TB > will become unusable and you have to edit prefs.js manually. To be honest I don't remember how I got the fonts bigger, I saw that in Firefox you can change the settings of fonts and mine is set at 16 (which seems high to be the default one), but I don't know whether it affects only the text inside the pages or also the menus. I struggled with this problem years ago so I don't remember how got the other text bigger. I tried changing the font change in Firefox 59 but nothing happened (not to the text not to the menus). I will give it a try to the options suggested. Various users in the "theme font size changer" mentioned editing the source code of the addon to remove the timebomb which seems to be present in the code and that breaks the addon every 90 day. On my system such change had no effect and text is still very small. I will try edit layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and see if there is any chance, however I would like to stress that users shouldn't mess around with code to change the font size in a software which is used also by non experts to read a lot of text (emails and rss feeds). Therefore I really hope such useful option can be added by default in Thunderbird. ps: I see that this is not a problem related only to the (small) Linux users base, but affects Windows users too
Forgot to mention, even if the tweak to the addon works the fix will last only 90 days before the addon breaks again...
Hmm, it would be good to know how you changed it in FF. Changing fonts has no effect since they don't apply the the UI but only web pages which specify no fonts, which is almost non-existent these days. If you create a new profile in FF, do you get larger fonts? If not, you changed a preference. Changing preferences is quite normal for "power users" with special requirements, I wouldn't call it "mess around with code". You could even inspect the value of layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in FF.
Ok I am a fool, I spent 2 hours trying to remember how I changed the font size... then on Firefox I checked layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and it has a changed value of 1.4 :) I checked the same for TB and it was at -1.0, I changed it to 1.4 and it worked! Strangely enough though, when I unistalled the addon it switched back to -1.0 so I had to reinstall the addon and set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.4 again. Is it a normal behavior? I consider myself a power user on FF, however not so much on TB, but I think the ability to set the size of fonts it can be really useful for many users with sight-issues and editing advanced stuff is not something easy to do for many.
I don't know what the add-on does apart from messing with layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and other preferences. If you uninstall the add-on, set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.4 manually, that value persists to the next session. I've just tried it. We could do some investigation about that preference and then expose it in the user interface with values between 1.0 and 1.5 perhaps. Richard, what do you think?
Yes, that could make sense to expose it. But yes, we need to be sure we accept only safe values...and a "Default" value to reset the setting because 1.0 is not the default.
FYI: On macOS with a 5120 × 2880 display, the default TB font size is significantly smaller than any font used by the system. To get the mailbox and messages lists fonts to display normally, I need a layout.css.devPixelsPerPx of 2.6-2.8. At these values, the lists are rational, but the message font becomes huge. At a value of 1.4, the fonts are so small as to be nearly unreadable.
I wholeheartedly agree. Changing layout.css.devPixelsPerPx really doesn't help. For me, any change above 1.1 makes items start to get truncated. And, that changes most every font. And, even changing that value to around 1.4 doesn't help, disregarding the truncation. The font size increase is miniscule. The only fonts that need to change are those of the various Boxes and the navigator on the left. The fact that it uses some Windows fonts is not helpful, because some windows fonts are NOT CUSTOMIZABLE. I'm thinking specifically of the font used for Windows Option dialogs. I wish I knew how to "name" these dialogs better. But, their font is very small and it looks like Thunderbird is using the same system font.
I'm a new user of thunderbird, I dont have vision problems, and i also find the font crazy small. I'm a software developer and not afraid of add-ons but even i'm baffled by how to find a fix for the "90day timebomb" for the add-on (can someone add instructions how to fix that here?). I'm not prepared to fiddle with CSS either, it's way too involved. I've added my vote to this bug, i hope it gets triaged.
(In reply to dottydomino from comment #18) > I'm a new user of thunderbird, I dont have vision problems, and i also find > the font crazy small. I'm a software developer and not afraid of add-ons > but even i'm baffled by how to find a fix for the "90day timebomb" for the > add-on (can someone add instructions how to fix that here?). I'm not > prepared to fiddle with CSS either, it's way too involved. I've added my > vote to this bug, i hope it gets triaged. Search in the review on the TB addons website, basically you have to delete one line to stop such behaviour. I tried but no luck hence I opened this topic. Apparently someone also made a patched version that remove it, but I wouln't recommend installing some random addon from google drive or worse, especially if you can't check the sourcecode.
This is essentially bug 570442
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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