Help file font too small

[Guillaume Dargaud]

Hello all,
One thing that has long bothered me and I hope is solved in CVI 9.0 is that
the font in the chm help file of CVI has a fixed size and is much too small.
Using [Ctrl][numpad +] or [Ctrl][Scrollwheel] on it doesn't do a thing.

And with today's screen with huge dpi it's getting unreadable. It's a simple
fix in the css file.

So, has this been fixed in 9.0 ?
--
Guillaume Dargaud
http://www.gdargaud.net/
"If you cannot measure, then your knowledge is meagre and
atisfactory." - Lord Kelvin's dictum.

[LuisG]

Hello Guillaume,

So far as I know, you're the first person to mention this, so no, nothing has changed in 9.0.

The viewer that is used to display the CVI help is the standard Windows help viewer, so unfortunately there's nothing we can do to make it more responsive to users' font preferences (like using [Ctrl][numpad +], for example). It only knows how to display the exact font that is specified in the help's style sheet.

Something you can try, which will affect all pages that you see with IE-based applications (such as the help viewer) is to tell IE to ignore the fonts specified in the style sheet. To test it out, go to IE and select Tools>>Internet Options. In the General tab, click the Acceessibility button, and then check the "Ignore font sizes..." option.That might make the help font larger.

Luis

[Guillaume Dargaud]

Hello LuisG,

I've been using your suggestion before and it doesn't bother my web surfing
as Firefox uses other settings, but it has unfortunate side effects, such as
making the text huge in the function panel help boxes.

But you are wrong (sorry!) about not being able to change fonts on chm
files. It all depends on how the fonts are specified in the stylesheet of
the chm file. If you use fixed sizes in pix or mm (and you shouldn't), then
yes, the size can't be changed by the user. But if you specify it as
''size:small;" and everything else as relative, then it's changeable. Just
like any website.

Also, when you create your chm file, the chm compiler has a setting to add a
font size button on the menu. See for instance this file I created long ago:
http://www.gdargaud.net/Zips/Css.chm

--
Guillaume Dargaud
http://www.gdargaud.net/

[LuisG]

I didn't mean to suggest that there was nothing that we (meaning NI) could do to improve the fonts in the .chm. What I meant was that, given the .chm as it is, it is not possible to change the fonts in the viewer. But now that I've seen your .chm I realize that I was wrong. I didn't know about this font button in the viewer.

All NI applications use a common, standardized style sheet for their help files. So, this is not something that we can change just for CVI. But I will go ahead and escalate this issue and see if we can come up with a solution that everyone is happy with. But if we can't change it for some reason, at a minimum we'll make sure that the viewer has a Font button.

Luis

Message Edited by LuisG on 11-26-2008 12:28 PM

[Guillaume Dargaud]

Thanks, that's excellent support from NI as usual.
--
Guillaume Dargaud
http://www.gdargaud.net/
"The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they
laughed at Galileo...' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the
wn'." - Carl Sagan.

[lomed]

Let me add my voice to this request. The font size in CVI help is

too small for my trifocals. Please make it adjustable.

      Marty O.

[Guillaume Dargaud]

> All NI applications use a common, standardized style sheet for their help
> files.

Then why is the text we get in a FP help bigger than the text we get in the
main help file ?
The two seem linked, the former always bigger when I force a bigger font,
which is counterintuitive since the window size is fixed in some cases (for
instance the Control Attribute help for GetCtrlAttribute).
--
Guillaume Dargaud
http://www.gdargaud.net/

[LuisG]

The function panel help does not use the same style sheet that the online help uses. Online help is standardized across all NI applications, but function panel help is a CVI-specific concept, therefore it is not affected by cross-product standards (and no, I'm not going to defend these cross-product standards, at least not in this instance).

You are correct, however, in that the two are linked: their content is identical, even if the formatting isn't.

Luis