ENH: dynamic font resizing functionality

klauer commented 10 months ago

Description

Based on tests in https://github.com/pcdshub/qtpy-dynamic-font-size-label (thanks to https://github.com/jonaias/DynamicFontSizeWidgets) this adds a monkeypatching tool for widgets which have fonts and contain text
Using this method, the widget size in the layout then determines how big the widget will be and therefore how big the font will be
It seems viable, though should be used sparingly as it has the potential to impact performance
Added padding option to the original proof-of-concept

Motivation and Context

New embedded positioner screens in #563 - @ZLLentz was aiming to have positioner readback values display in large form uniformly on all displays.

How Has This Been Tested?

A bit interactively and with the included unit test. It'd be a good idea to do more interactive testing, I think. I also updated our upstream test repository in the meantime with the same tweaks, so it's a lot easier to test there:

Where Has This Been Documented?

This PR.

Screenshots (if appropriate):

The readback widget has this applied - and the font fills it well:

klauer commented 10 months ago

Is this worth pursuing @ZLLentz or should we aim for a different approach? Relevant commit for a convenient single-click: 476a146

ZLLentz commented 10 months ago

I think this is worth pursuing, not just for the readback but for the other visible text fields in the positioner widget (both the compact version and the non-compact version)

My only critique is the lack of margins which plays poorly with the blue borders (but probably looks exactly correct for non-blue-border elements)

klauer commented 10 months ago

My only critique is the lack of margins which plays poorly with the blue borders (but probably looks exactly correct for non-blue-border elements)

Added a padding setting for that purpose ("pad_percent", proportional to widget size) in the patching method.

I'll try to extract this from the positioner PR now - apologies for the bumpy force pushes ahead

klauer commented 10 months ago

Do we think there's value in a ctrl + + / ctrl + - type of feature? Assuming it could be implemented without as bad of a performance penalty (maybe we don't have to hook paintEvent, but rather just scale font sizes up and down), that might provide users better control over sizes.

I think that's a good idea, though rather hard to implement properly - one widget may resize as you had hoped and another may be clipped and unreadable.

I think context-sensitive menus in PyDM, allowing fine-grained font size adjustment on a per-widget basis, could be an option. Context menus are rather underutilized there in my opinion. Imagine an "Advanced" section that allows you to increase the (fixed) size of a given widget and/or increase the font size to match its size. I think of PyDM as an expert-facing app of sorts and giving more knobs to the user (so long as they're unobtrusive) could only be a positive thing.

pcdshub / typhos