Font size across devices...

[Mike B]

I noticed that in general AI2 renders pretty well across different screen sizes with different resolution density.  I think because, for the most part, and where possible I have used percentages and automatic sizing in design. However I started designing on 1 phone which cracked up, and had to finish on another replacement phone which was a much higher resolution. The result being that design elements containing text rendered ok in the new phone, but elements (text) which were 'calculated' i.e. read from a csv file and shown in a listpicker, were very small. Obviously reacting to the different resolution.

I did some reading on this, and am wondering if dp/dip is the solution? Can anyone help?

TIA

[SteveJG]

MIT had an extensive internal discussion of responsive font sizes about mid 2016.  The MIT position is "One of the things that makes this difficult with App Inventor is that in a lot of Android development, the developer specifies separate screen layouts for different size devices.  We do not do that in App Inventor and it would be a large change to switch to that. "  The MIT development team realize  that separate layouts for different screen sizes might not be sufficient to handle fonts in an all encompassing improvement to achieve responsive fonts, because of density.

Yes, how to handling dp/dip is a seriously being considered but achieving responsive font with AI would require major changes.  The discussion showed differences in screen density of higher end devices would be extremely difficult to overcome. Android Studio uses separate layouts for different screen sizes and considers dpi.  Providing transparency across devices  even with AS is difficult and complicates development.

MIT is aware users would like to have responsive fonts.  It it appears from general lack of discussion probably indicates that may not be possible in the short term.   Is MIT actively attempting to develop responsive fonts?    A guess is not.. If you need responsive fonts and the tools the Professional Android developers use for quality Apps, you need to consider Android Studio or Eclipse etc. 

Regards,

Steve

[Mike B]

What about using ems instead of points? How much of a change would that require?

[SteveJG]

Ask that here   

App Inventor Open Source Development - Google Groups

and possibly volunteer your services Mike.   AI2 is Open Source, you possibly could create a fork   

MIT App Inventor Sources

[Abraham Getzler]

Did you try Boban's Web Viewer resizing trick?

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mitappinventortest/_b6jmQGNugI/zBOZzuA_BAAJ

ABG