FONT size tooo small for iOS (iPhone mini and iPad mini) - can't see

[itoldusoandso]

Describe the feature you'd like to request

The font size in the app is too small. Need to be able to set the font size for the link url list to be able to comfortably to scroll it without having to use magnifying glass. Really small. It's painful on the eyes.

Describe the solution you'd like

Allow font size setting in the app for the URL list

Describe alternatives you've considered

Using magnifying glass or throwing the phone against the wall were options considered.

[github-actions[bot]]

Hello :wave:

Thank you for taking the time to open this issue with floccus. I know it's frustrating when software causes problems. You have made the right choice to come here and open an issue to make sure your problem gets looked at and if possible solved. I'm Marcel and I created floccus and have been maintaining it ever since. I currently work for Nextcloud which leaves me with less time for side projects like this one than I used to have. I still try to answer all issues and if possible fix all bugs here, but it sometimes takes a while until I get to it. Until then, please be patient. Note also that GitHub is a place where people meet to make software better together. Nobody here is under any obligation to help you, solve your problems or deliver on any expectations or demands you may have, but if enough people come together we can collaborate to make this software better. For everyone. Thus, if you can, you could also have a look at other issues to see whether you can help other people with your knowledge and experience. If you have coding experience it would also be awesome if you could step up to dive into the code and try to fix the odd bug yourself. Everyone will be thankful for extra helping hands! One last word: If you feel, at any point, like you need to vent, this is not the place for it; you can go to the forum, to twitter or somewhere else. But this is a technical issue tracker, so please make sure to focus on the tech and keep your opinions to yourself.

I look forward to working with you on this issue Cheers :blue_heart:

[marcelklehr]

@itoldusoandso Could you post a screenshot?

[itoldusoandso]

Hello and thank you. Attached is the screenshot of the real size and the real size sizing chart for comparison.

[marcelklehr]

Aaargh, don't we just love Apple... They've rejected my latest patch release on the grounds of a Design guideline violation... :facepalm: This will take a while... Sorry.

[sproggit]

Marcel, thanks for picking this up - and thanks to itoldusoandso for registering it. I have the same issue with my 12" iPadPro

[itoldusoandso]

Haha, Apple design police. I would have thought they should have banned the app on the grounds that the letters are too small. Nuts.

On Friday, July 5, 2024, Marcel Klehr @.***> wrote:

Aaargh, don't we just love Apple... They've rejected my latest patch release on the grounds of a Design guideline violation... 🤦 This will take a while... Sorry.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.< https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/meips/ADKq_NakWNj8TJtLd99fX8bHKA1llaWDJDi0HTdhgYjW_qHbiI9fY06mAQZW8yRBio860gKSzU6ukWUQyb3JW6gIkZxTQGYGY3YmqChT5YrUMap1t4Hz5NuU_08AyfZjp23MNk36reOFNgvKlzhpTCnUfrlwmoW1EIQQVFs80Yg0PrFWt3kgehSKmxHWFpA28mb9qS4qXueMViPV4AIPKLFBe032K3yIFtLM5qN-wsDXgVOTlCiGuFP6K7A=s0-d-e1-ft#https://github.com/notifications/beacon/ARFDDSPWBOXJWWBNIR2UH2TZKY6WBA5CNFSM6AAAAABKBNJA6SWGG33NNVSW45C7OR4XAZNMJFZXG5LFINXW23LFNZ2KUY3PNVWWK3TUL5UWJTUDXZP4K.gif>Message ID: @.***>

[marcelklehr]

Update is out now, please test the new version

[marcelklehr]

Can you confirm whether the update fixes the font size?

[sproggit]

Marcel, I've just checked and I'm afraid I don't see a difference. I deleted Floccus and then re-installed as I couldn't find a way to provoke my iPad into pulling down the update. I am using an iPad Pro 12" running iPadOS 17.5.1. However, I am not sure if this is relevant, but even though I can see Floccus on my iOS desktop... when I go in to "Settings" there isn't an entry for Floccus in the App list, so I can't even tell you what version is present...

[marcelklehr]

Mmh, I'll continue to try to fix this. Thank you for the feedback!

[itoldusoandso]

Checked here on iPad Mini 4 and iPhone 12 mini and no change. The font on iPad Mini is just one defree bigger than on iPhone Mini but they are both very small.

[marcelklehr]

I've just published a new update, now with a new capacitor version that disables Zooming on iOS, which might be the reason why the text is so small on some devices.

[sproggit]

Hi Marcel,

No change [yet] for iPadOS Version 17.5.1/Floccus v5.2.5 - at least, not in terms of getting the font size to change.

I have, however, managed to get around the issue with connecting this Floccus instance to an instance of NextCloud running on a Raspberry Pi on my home network and using a certificate signed by the Texadactyl CA written by Richard Elkins... So that side of things is all good and I'm getting bookmark replication to work... but even on a 12.9" iPad, the text remains tiny.

But we're heading in the right direction...

[marcelklehr]

Thank you for the feedback. It's tough for me to fix this, because I cannot reproduce this and also not all users seem to not be affected, so just increasing the font-size in general would be too overzealous.

[sproggit]

Marcel, I don't know if this is in any way helpful, but... I've just taken a couple of screen shots on my iPad (12.9" iPad Pro)... The first was of the Floccus display, showing some of the bookmark structure that is now replicating perfectly with my local NextCloud instance. The second was of the iPad's native "Settings" application.

When I load the two images on to my PC and compare them side-by-side, I would estimate that the Floccus text is close to half the size of the [default] text in iPadOS "Settings".

To my [admittedly aging but still pretty good eyes] the "Settings" font is quite clear and legible, but the Floccus text is not.

In the hope that they might give you some perspective of what I mean, I've uploaded the two images here, so you can compare side-by-side.

Happy to continue supporting you with the diagnostic/triage if there is anything else you'd like me to do. I appreciate that it's all to easy for me to make a comment like this... but if you were able to find a way to adjust the font size to be the same as the default font in the "Settings" application, that would be perfect. I am under no illusions that this is likely far more difficult than it seems - or you would have done that at the outset. Hope this helps.

[marcelklehr]

Can you perhaps measure the font-size? It should be about half a centimeter in v5.2.5, 0.45cm to be exact

[sproggit]

Hi Marcel,

Definitely not 4.5mm high - using a metal "precision" ruler and a magnifying glass, with the ruler laid gently flat on the glass of the screen, I observe capital letters to be more than 1.5mm but less than 2mm high.

However, at that scale it is very difficult to be precise, so I went looking for a better way to express this. As you can see from the two screen shots that I posted yesterday, the resolution I get when using the built-in iOS screen capture - pressing the power and up volume buttons simultaneously - is 4096 x 2304 pixels.

So I used GIMP to zoom in on the same letter on the two different images ("B")... With the native iOS "Settings" application, a capital B renders at 30x22 pixels, including all the part-shaded, anti-aliased edges to the character, such as the right-most curved edges. With the Floccus screen shot, the capital B renders at 20x16 pixels, counting/measuring exactly the same rendered area.

Not even close to my previous thought that the Floccus font was rendering at half the size of native [it's almost exactly two-thirds, not half] but an appreciable difference all the same.

For your reference, I attach a couple more images, this of the GIMP-enlarged characters [rendered so individual pixels are clearly visible]. It might take a bit of experimenting, but note that the edges of the image rendering window in GIMP include pixel markers, so you can verify my dimensions quite easily. And I'm not sure if it is relevant at this stage, but if you look at GIMP's zoom indicator - bottom edge - you can see that both images had the zoom set to 6,400% when I grabbed them, so what you're seeing here is a consistent, like-for-like comparison, albeit one many times enlarged.

I spent a few minutes on line looking to see if I could get the physical dimensions of the display area of my iPad... (thinking that if I could get accurate values for the screen width and height then I could calculate the size as displayed from the number of rendered pixels). I can find the overall physical dimensions of the case of the thing... and I can find lots of people consistently reporting the wrong screen resolution... but in case it is relevant and just to ensure that I am accurate with the data I provide, this is the detail about my iPad that I get from "Settings >> About" :-1: iPad OS Version: 17.5.1 Model Name: iPad Pro (12.9 inch) (5th generation) Model Number: MHNH3B/A

Anyway, here's a rough hack-calculation... based on these dimensions (scroll down to "Dimensions and Sizes":-

https://www.dimensions.com/element/apple-ipad-pro-12-9-5th-gen-2021

That claims that the diagonal for the screen is 12.9 inches, or 328mm... But we also know that the ratios of the screen dimensions on the iPad Pro 12.9 are 4:3... We can borrow from Pythagoras, since a right-angled triangle with 4 units on one edge and 3 units on another will always have a hypotenuse of 5 units. We also know that 328mm is 5 units, so the height of the screen will be (328 * 3)/5, or 196.8 mm...

But since we also know, from my screen shots, that the height of the screen is 2304 pixels... then we know that there are 2304/196.8 (or 11.7) pixels to the mm on the vertical [shorter] axis of the display.

On that basis, then using the two screen shots listed with this post, we can say that the native iOS "B" has rendered at 30 pixels high, which is 2.56mm, while the "Floccus B" rendered at 20 pixels high, which is 1.709mm... I refer you back to the first paragraph of this reply, where I guesstimate the dimensions at "more than 1.5mm but less than 2mm".

So I feel pretty good about my guesstimate.

[marcelklehr]

Thank you, that clarifies it then, that something is technically wrong here

[marcelklehr]

Just found this feature, which might help us out: https://webkit.org/blog/3709/using-the-system-font-in-web-content/

[sproggit]

Don't get me wrong... I do not underestimate the challenge facing Apple when it comes to providing an environment for developers, so that people writing applications can know, with confidence, how their software will look, especially given Apple's rate of product launches and the challenges of writing software able to keep pace with multiple resolutions and screen ratios.

Having said that, this should be a problem that needs to be defined and solved once - by Apple!

As a developer, you should have access to an IDE that allows you to specify exactly how you'd like your application to look. [I haven't developed for XCode, but I would have thought/hoped that built in to the IDE there is an emulator that is capable of showing all the different Apple devices [or at least everything with a supported OS build] so that you can get a clear visualisation of what you are writing. And that IDE should be able to tell the resolution and model of your monitor and therefore give you an on-screen render that is size-for-size representative of what the user of the actual device would see...

It should not be necessary for you to have to go and buy a bunch of devices, just to test your code.

Sigh...

[marcelklehr]

I do have an emulator available, but in the emulated devices I've tried so far, the font-size seems fine. :/

[sproggit]

I do have an emulator available, but in the emulated devices I've tried so far, the font-size seems fine. :/

You have reminded me of: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

Let me know if you'd like any more help with testing. I actually have a couple of different iPads and an iPhone MR, though I've only installed Floccus on one of the iPads so far - but if you need me to test on different hardware, I can do that too.