Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

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rumo
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Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by rumo »

I still have to get used to the small overall font size of the GUI in Digital Performer 9 for the Mac.
Is there anything you can do about this?

I found SwitchResX which looks like the only solution beside using another theme with higher contrast. http://www.madrau.com
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Rick Cornish
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Re: Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by Rick Cornish »

I agree. The font size is the price of putting a lot of info on screen at the same time.

If you’re willing to sacrifice some detail, you could change your screen resolution to make everything larger. Choosing a theme with good contrast is also a big help. You can find lots of threads on customizing themes on MOTUnation. (I shared a theme I tweaked here: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=64043)

The other thing that helped me was to ask my Optometrist to write me a prescription for “computer glasses.” I measured the distance from where I sit to where my screen sits in my workstation and got him to write the spec for that exact distance, then got a pair of cheap glasses that have made a huge difference (much better than the glasses I wear for everything else).

Good luck!
Rick Cornish

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stubbsonic
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Re: Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by stubbsonic »

The font-size in DP is a topic that has come up a few times.

People here on the forum for the most part agree that MOTU SHOULD bump up the font size.

I see Rick's point (pardon the pun) about being able to fit more info with smaller font, but that's only true to a very limited degree. There have been numerous times when DP has undergone a "from the ground up" overhaul and UI elements could have been tweaked for modern high-res monitors. And we can muse about which version should have included a bump in font size. Alas.

For me, it's a minor inconvenience. And I notice most when I'm editing velocities in the lower pane, or editing tempos in the Conductor's Graphic Editor. But for me, the font size isn't the most annoying feature of editing in DP.
M1 MBP; OS 12, FF800, DP 11.3, Kontakt 7, Reaktor 6, PC3K7, K2661S, iPad6, Godin XTSA, Two Ibanez 5 string basses (1 fretted, 1 fretless), FM3, SY-1000, etc.

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bayswater
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Re: Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by bayswater »

Rick Cornish wrote:I agree. The font size is the price of putting a lot of info on screen at the same time.

If you’re willing to sacrifice some detail, you could change your screen resolution to make everything larger. Choosing a theme with good contrast is also a big help. You can find lots of threads on customizing themes on MOTUnation. (I shared a theme I tweaked here: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=64043)

The other thing that helped me was to ask my Optometrist to write me a prescription for “computer glasses.” I measured the distance from where I sit to where my screen sits in my workstation and got him to write the spec for that exact distance, then got a pair of cheap glasses that have made a huge difference (much better than the glasses I wear for everything else).

Good luck!
All three are goody for me. More contrast in the theme, different resolutions, and glasses set to the typical distance from the screen. Adding to that, I use a constant group of screen sets, duplicated for different screen resolutions. With that, a lot of the text, eg., the column headers, don’t matter because you already know what they say because they’re always in the same place. Similarly, templates with standard colours, track orders and names, etc. help.
2018 Mini i7 32G 10.14.6, DP 11.3, Mixbus 9, Logic 10.5, Scarlett 18i8
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rumo
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Re: Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by rumo »

Hi, thank you for the advices on how to cope with the font sizes in DP. It seems indeed that once you get used to it, it doesn’t bother you so much as you know the GUI elements and you don’t need to read what that do anymore!


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monkey man
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Re: Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by monkey man »

+1 for increasing the font size and "decluttering" the UI in a classy way as I know MOTU can.

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jloeb
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Re: Small fonts in Digital Performer 9

Post by jloeb »

[Bump+1000]. I'm still on my heavily-modded cheesegrater Mac Pro 3.5GHz 12 core which has plenty of life in it; enough to get me to the first revision of the forthcoming mac pro I hope and/or another generation into the great What'sNext. The Mojave update will require Metal-compatible GPU cards, all of which allow 4K resolution; and since 4K monitors are now essentially just slices of TV, they're inexpensive and awesome. And never mind people with newer CPUs:

High pixel density is quickly becoming the bog-standard present as much as the future.

It's time for bigger fonts in DP. Even if not a fully procedural resizable GUI update, just a BIGFONT theme or two, or a scale-doubling render kludge as a bandaid would be a blessing. Half of my DP keystrokes consist of toggling zoom now. So nice to be able to see so much of what's going on; just need to be able to read those leeeeetle characters now.
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