Font kerning in list and message display is too open

[athompso]

In both the conversation list screen and the message screen, the font kerning puts far too much space between each letter, resulting in a slightly odd look that's hard to read. I'm guessing this might be because I've got the system scaling turned up a bit so I can, y'know, read the text on my screen, but am not sure. If so, the toolkit or API calls are interpreting something wrong. I do have the ability to sideload for testing.

[athompso]

I can also forward screencaps privately, I'd prefer not to share my messages with all of GitHub ;-)

[michaelkourlas]

You can email me screencaps if you want at michael@kourlas.com.

I use the material design text styles for the message and conversation views, and I have noticed that the font kerning is different from the Android defaults.

[athompso]

The body text in the Voip.ms SMS app appears to be using a "display" style with extra letter spacing.  That's one of the prime no-nos in text formatting.  I can't tell what style is in use, but it's not just kerning. Screenshots sent directly to Michael.

[michaelkourlas]

Actually, the message text in the conversations and conversation view use TextAppearance.MaterialComponents.Body2 and TextAppearance.MaterialComponents.Body1 respectively, so blame Google :P

[athompso]

Oh, barf. Well, I blame Google for many other things, that just adds one more to the list. Anyway, I suggest at least letting users customize the fonts/styles in order to get us out of your hair.

[athompso]

Quoting from Google's article about their research that went into the text field design:

Material Design’s goal was to determine how to improve the text field to make it more distinguishable, easier to read, and more understandable — with a more clear touch target. We wanted users to be able to fill out a form correctly and quickly.

...except these aren't text fields I'm complaining about. (That's from https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03, BTW)

[michaelkourlas]

Sure, but these styles aren't meant to apply to text fields exclusively.

I think it's unlikely I will make the styling configurable, but I will look at making it more like Google Messages, since that's one of the design goals of this app.

[athompso]

I don't suppose you have a beta APK build with this change, that I can test?

[michaelkourlas]

No -- you'll have to do a manual build if you want to preview the changes.