LabVIEW
FP Geometry - Mac vs Win
On both my Mac & PC, I have the following settings:
FPFont="Arial" 15
BDFont="Arial" 15
appFont=""Tahoma" 15"
dialogFont=""Tahoma" 15"
systemFont=""Tahoma" 15"
On Windows, I get an FP like this:
On a Mac, I get this:
Any suggestions?
In general Font's rendering in LabVIEW looks a little bit... hmmm... strange for me.
For example, our company's identity font is "Poppins". Default font for LabVIEW is Segoue UI 15 pt. When I will just replace Segoe UI to Poppins, then it looks like that:
Obviously too small rendered. Of course, I checked this in Word as well as in C# WPF app, and this looks completely different:
By the way, this is 100% 1:1, so 15 pt in Word is completely different from 15 pt in LabVIEW.
What I have done is just correct the metrics of Poppins in Fontographer and renamed this to Poppins UI (this is "Open Source" and not proprietary Font). The "reference" metrics was taken from Segoe UI. Now they are almost the same:
The second change I've made is the width of digits. In a good UI font, when we need to display numbers, especially in the tables, the digits must be monospaced (like in Courier), but not the letters. So, I changed all digits to a constant width (compare the first screenshot with the last one where 1111... is entered under 1234....).Finally, I've corrected small issues like the dot on the 'i' being too close to the 'I' and I'm happy now.Theoretically, you can create a font pair that will appear exactly the same on both OS (don't forget about Linux), but this is quite an amount of work. For me, it took three weekends until I've got things done.
By the way, fonts rendering on Mac looks slightly better than on Windows (at least for me), therefore on Windows PC I using the software called MacType, which can improve rendering a little bit (but not the size, the only aliasing looks better and can be "fine tuned").
@paul_a_cardinale wrote:
@altenbach wrote:
Are you sure Tahoma even exists on your Mac?
It exists on my Mac. I don't remember installing it (but then I don't remember a lot of stuff).
Yes, it exists on Mac 'Out of the Box'. I tried to install it, but Mac told me it was already installed...
This is how it looks on PC when System Tab Control used and 15 pt Tahoma in LabVIEW 2024:
Now same VI downgraded to 2023 and opened on Mac, when defaults changed to 15 pt Tahoma:
Everything is much larger and some encoding troubles with üöäß letters.
By the way, on MacOS the default FP font is 12 pt and not 15 pt like on PC:
When Modern Style used instead of System, then it looks like this:
PC:
And on Mac with Default 12 pt (sorry, occasionally changed default on Boolean Control and too lazy to make new screenshot, but Tab Control is not changed):
When set to 15 pt Tahoma:
So, as summary, the 15 pt Tahoma on PC is not equal to 15 pt Tahoma on Mac. It is somewhere between 12 and 13 pt.
This is side by side comparizon 15 pt on PC vs 12 pt on Mac, a little bit "too small" on Mac:
and this is 15 pt vs 13 pt, now a little bit "too large":
For this experiment the LabVIEW 2023 Q3 Community Edition was used on Mac Sonoma 14.4.1 and LabVIEW Professional 2024 Q1 64-bit was used on Windows 11 23H2.
By the way, my colleague who owns the Mac told me in the past that he had purchased a very expensive high-resolution monitor, and when it was connected to the Mac, everything looked 'weird' and unsharp because the Mac supported high resolution only on certain resolutions, like Retina Displays, and on custom monitors, it didn't look very good. The same issue occurs on Windows - on high-resolution displays when HiDPI scaling is used, LabVIEW looks bad. However, this affects mostly the sharpness, but it can also affect the font sizes. Tests above was done at 100% scale.
All I can say that out of curiosity, I tried some of my programs on Linux and the font problems were huge. I use mostly Tahoma. It took a lot of manual work to make things look reasonable but the end result was not that bad.
(see here)
No, I don't have a "before" picture but all fonts were way too large and even overlapping...
As update to previous message - that shouls work as long as you will not change Font's sizes manually and only by settings. This is how Mac Fuze Controls with 12 pt Tahoma compared to PC with 15 pt Tahoma (on the right side is just screenshot):
Interesting fact that on Linux 12 pt is too large and closest font size, which will not affect (enlage) the sizes is 11 pt:
