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mastodon / mastodon-android

Official Android app for Mastodon
https://app.joinmastodon.org/android
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Line height broken since 2.4.1 #791

Open MarcelCoding opened 2 months ago

MarcelCoding commented 2 months ago

Since 2.4.1:

Screenshot_20240308-100241.png

In 2.4.0:

Screenshot_20240308-100408.png

jotaluissoy commented 2 months ago

I don't understand the issue.

MarcelCoding commented 2 months ago

Please compare the line height in the two screenshots. The first one (current releases) has an increased line height while the second one (2.4.0) has a "normal" line height.

kdekooter commented 2 months ago

+1 here. It looks quite awful + it takes up valuable space.

@MarcelCoding maybe you should correct the typo in the subject of this issue ;-).

MarcelCoding commented 2 months ago

Thanks for the hint, I did not notice it.

kdekooter commented 2 months ago

This might be the commit that caused it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/commit/217884aaeca17196628f85e059e9855c0fc70aff

Gargron commented 2 months ago

This is an intentional design change. Feel free to give feedback on it but there's no point digging for the "cause", it's not a bug.

kdekooter commented 2 months ago

Fair enough. Let the feedback be "we really don't like it, we prefer the original line height" :-)

jotaluissoy commented 2 months ago

@Gargron Personally I love this new design.

MarcelCoding commented 2 months ago

Then it should be at least consistent. Have a look at the open graph box of my screenshots. There is always the old lone height used.

kdekooter commented 2 months ago

My final 2c here. The new line height is taking up a lot of screen real estate.

image

rubcap commented 2 months ago

+1

I am not a fan of this design trend where a lot of whitespacing is added at the expense of visible content. The previous line height seemed fine?

@Gargron Can we have a density setting "compact/ normal/wide" in the app to change the spacing?

samhenrigold commented 2 months ago

Hi all, designer on the app here.

I found the original line height was wayyyy too tight and hurt legibility. Users complained about what was perceived as font size, but M3.body.large is the default for long passages across the system — we determined that this is likely due to the typesetting of the text looking too crunched. We didn’t get it quite right on the release version, but we think we’ve found the right values between line height and tracking.

Mockups:

Screenshot 2024-03-11 at 12 01 48 PM

Tracking changes are still up in the air, but we’re happy with the new line height.

As for @rubcap’s comment about adding a density setting, I agree and think it’s a great idea. We’ll add that to our internal backlog. We want to get that setting right though, so we’ll evaluate different typesetting for different densities so we’re not just blindly tweaking values which might take some extra time. Be on the lookout for that soon.

samhenrigold commented 2 months ago

As for @MarcelCoding’s note about making it consistent, I fully agree. We wanted to fix the post body typography first since it’s where more breathing space would make the most impact, but we want better legibility to be applied anywhere we anticipate multi-line text to occur.

rubcap commented 2 months ago

@samhenrigold What's the difference between line height and tracking?

Can we expect to see the "proposed solution" in the next release? Do you have an ETA for the density setting?

This change made me want to switch to another Mastodon client, it's that annoying. Luckily, I like the design of the official app better than competitors. I also don't understand why the line height was changed while users asked for an option to increase the font size? Didn't this get pushed a little too fast?

Appreciate your quick feedback though ;)

samhenrigold commented 2 months ago

What's the difference between line height and tracking?

Line height (leading) is the spacing between lines, tracking (letter spacing) is the spacing between letters in a line.

Some people refer to tracking as “kerning” but that’s its own thing.

Can we expect to see the "proposed solution" in the next release? Do you have an ETA for the density setting?

Not sure when to expect those changes, but hoping to get the line height changes in the next app update. Letter spacing is still an open question and may or may not be in the next release.

Density will have to come later since we’ve got higher priority tasks that need to be addressed.

rubcap commented 2 months ago

Thanks for the insights, @samhenrigold. Guess I'll have to wait for the density setting to be added.

I hope to see a "compact" mode that restores the old line height (and tracking) and maximizes visible content (e.g. by replacing the large bottom navigation bar on Android by a more compact version). Because at the moment (app v2.4.1), I can only see 1 to 1,5 posts on a single screen (Samsung S10).

rubcap commented 2 months ago

Created feature request here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/799