Phoenix profiles: global font sizes

[johndallman]

My sight is quite poor, and the default font sizes for Phoenix are uncomfortably small for me. I can change them, but there are a lot of sizes to change. It took me quite a few hours to get a comfortable setup on the machine I use for my own character sheets, and I haven't dared to install a newer Phoenix on there yet.

I've updated the system I use for some of my players' characters to the latest Phoenix, and the new profiles are great, but the sheets have fonts that are too small for me to read comfortably. This doesn't matter all that much for players' sheets, but I'm stuck with the older Phoenix on the first system.

What would be really handy would be a way to increase all the font sizes in approximate proportion in one operation. I haven't found it yet - does it exist?

[Bruno]

Not that I know of, without doing something tricky like telling your computer you're printing to a small papersize and to scale-to-fit your letter or A4 size paper. Which, as I know in the Accessability business, is NOT the same as making the fonts bigger.

That said, upgrading your phoenix shouldn't blow away your settings unless you have a particularly old phoenix? at which point a series of incremental upgrades should do the trick at worst.

[Bruno]

Actually, let me take it back. Save out a profile for phoenix, open it up in a text editor, do a mass search/replace on the various offending font sizes would be useful. It's not being done in the program, but it's still pretty quickly being done.

[Bruno]

Third comment I swear - there's only two font sizes to change. I'm not sure what the labor is?

[TorgSmith]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Actually, let me take it back. Save out a profile for phoenix, open it up in a text editor, do a mass search/replace on the various offending font sizes would be useful. It's not being done in the program, but it's still pretty quickly being done.

Just a note on the find and replace comment.

Don’t do it with just the number you want changed. Make sure you have some of the text around the number included in the find and replace. If you don’t, you could change numbers you did not want to.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Third comment I swear - there's only two font sizes to change. I'm not sure what the labor is?

My faulty memory. I spent a lot of time last year tweaking my profile to a grey-scale as well as changing the fonts. My memory said there were a lot of places to change fonts as well as colours, but if you've checked, you'll be right.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by johndallman

My faulty memory. I spent a lot of time last year tweaking my profile to a grey-scale as well as changing the fonts. My memory said there were a lot of places to change fonts as well as colours, but if you've checked, you'll be right.

I could only find two places to change actual font faces and sizes. A zillion colours though, yes.

[tmedwards]

Yes, there are, currently, only two basic fonts used in Phoenix, one for form text and one for user data – although, I do believe I cross their domains in several instances. The configured sizes are the default sizes used throughout most of the sheet for the fonts in question, and any sizes that differ from the configured sizes are generally based upon them – I don't think that I hard-code any font sizes, outside of the GURPS logo text anyway. So, as you increase the default sizes, all other non-default sizes increase as well.

BTW, what version is your "older Phoenix"? Because I agree with Bruno in that you should save your current profile, but depending on how old your Phoenix is you may need to upgrade first, which could require a staged upgrade if your older Phoenix is really old. As long as it's no older than 1.43, the current release will upgrade its options just fine.

[johndallman]

Really old: 1.35. I didn't upgrade because there was no obvious need at the time, the initial explanations of profiles weren't very clear, and I had a lot of effort invested in the setup I had. How should the upgrade process be carried out, now that the greyscale setups make it attractive?

Please spell things out: GCA has always seemed very alien software to me, and I have learned by painful experience that my deductions about how to deal with it are usually profoundly wrong. This is why I am un-ambitious with it.

[TorgSmith]

Export your configuration like Bruno mentioned in her second post. There are two files that make up the Phoenix sheet. If you backup those files before you upgrade, then you can revert if the import fails. If you need to revert, you can just import the save you did with the configuration.

I would recommend going through the effort to upgrade. You might want a feature that gets added at some time and the pain to upgrade at them time might be much worse.