Ability to Increase the Developer News Font Size

[erictor]

Installed product versions

• Visual Studio 2019
• Developer News version 1.1.0.2

Description

I can't see how to increase the Developer News font size.

Expected behavior

Could an ability to increase the Developer News font size be added?

[yannduran]

Fonts and colors have both been improved in v1.2, which now matches the selected Visual Studio theme. I hope that helps!

[erictor]

Thanks for your response. I updated the Developer News extension. The version reported for the Update was 1.3 rather than 1.2. The font size didn't increase merely by updating, so I clicked on Options and did not see a setting within Developer News options to change the font size (which would be ideal). So my hope is that you would be aware what existing Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors setting could be used to impact the font size of Developer News. Thank you.

[yannduran]

You're welcome, I'm just sorry it's taken so long to get back to you about your issue.

v1.3 adds a couple of new options, I only mentioned v1.2 because I felt it addressed your issue.

As I'm thinking about how to respond to your feedback, I realised that the v.12 update was focused on selecting better color tokens to match the currently selected VS theme to produce acceptable results in any theme. I may not have in fact changed anything to do with fonts or font sizes. The reason that I thought I had was because when I was dogfooding the update I remember seeing Developer News and Start Page+ side-by-side and thinking that they now looked the same whereas I thought that I remembered seeing the Developer News window with smaller text.

I'll have to look further into the font/font sizes that I'm using and see if I'm using hard coded values (I hope not!) and I'll get back to you.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Btw, were you aware of my Start Page+ extension? It also has Developer News in it. It's basically a combination of what everyone loved about the VS 2017 Start Page (including Developer News), and a bit from VS 2019's Start Window. All in a non-modal, dockable document window.

[yannduran]

I just installed the version prior to v1.2 to see if there had indeed been a change in font size like I thought I remembered.

Here's Start Page+ and Developer News v1.1.0.2 side-by-side, and you can see why I thought I'd addressed the font size issue.

And here's Start Page+ and Developer News v1.3 side by side.

I just wanted to verify that my memory wasn't as bad as it appeared lol.

Let me know your thoughts.

[erictor]

As I've been aging, my eyesight isn't what it used to be, so to make Visual Studio a bit more "old man friendly" I bumped Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors | Show Settings For: Environment to Calibri 13. That seemed to affect several things, nudging up the size of Solution Explorer, and as you can see when I display the 'wonderful' modal Start dialog, it seemed to up that one up considerably. Displaying Developer News along with those two, for me, Developer News is just hard to read. I suppose I could switch my "normal mode looking at a monitor" glasses with more high-powered reading glasses and put my nose about 3 inches away from the monitor and read Developer News, but, that seems like it could induce a headache. Ideally it would be a whole lotta awesome, for me, if I could bump up the Developer News font as I pleased, as its own thing.

Thanks

[yannduran]

Believe me I hear you about the eyesight thing! I have good days and bad says though. The optometrist has said he thinks I'd benefit from reading glasses, but I haven't gone down that road yet even though things are starting to get a bit blurry for smaller-sized text.

I've got a 34" ultra-wide monitor (with a resolution of 3440 x 1440), and I have to bump that up to 125% in Windows, just so i can read small text on it. My second monitor is a 27" (with a resolution of 1920 x 1080) which I can leave set at the default 100%.

I definitely don't like the idea of you or anyone needing to switch glasses just to read Developer News's text, so I'd like to address this for both Developer News and Start Page+.

I could solve this in one of two ways:

1. I could attempt to tie into the Environment setting (if that's possible in WPF), so that the window's text does in fact match what we see in Solution Explorer etc.
2. Add settings for for the font and three font sizes that I use.

Option 1 has the possible advantage of consistency between tool windows.
Option 2 has the advantage that it can be different to other tool windows.

There's also a setting for All Text Tool Windows, which in theory is what Developer News should be using by default, except that I checked and I am in fact hard-coding the values. :-( I guess I did that because I needed three sizes.

Seeing as you're showing the Start Window and are using stand-alone Developer News that you're not a Start Page+ user?

[erictor]

I tend to work on one solution for such a long period of time that the notion of "Start"-ing something is just not much of a deal for me. I have the Start thingie only displaying on demand and I almost never 'demand' it. I didn't realize until you just pointed it out that you have a replacement Start window for those that are unhappy with what Microsoft did, I think that's great but I might not personally need it so much. My big thing was the removal of the Dev news, and you've got a nice answer for that. Thanks for being willing to look into the whole font size thing. My thought about option 1, vs. option 2, is "YES!" "I'd like both of those!!" Yeah, I actually personally see value in both. If someone ups their entire environment (or text tool, whichever) font, I can see being consistent with that intent being a pleasing and intuitive thing. But I think if you could also provide customization for Dev news specifically, that would be great too. Er, what I mean is, those properties could default to a setting that means "respect my environment setting", but if the user puts in a customized setting, then that customized setting wins out. Who knows, maybe I want to stare at Dev news in a 36 pt font to have it really slam home to me! I'd be the only one on the planet doing that, but, hey, maybe I retain information better when it's billboard-sized!