Patch Tool Icon

[Myra Krallman]

Whereare the controls to enlarge my tools icon sizes? I can't find it anywhere, and because I am a Senior (older) person, the tool icons are so small they are difficult for me to read and understand. I have attached an image of the tools I am talking about.

Thanks for the quick reply, MEB, I really appreciate it. No ability to change icon size is a real bummer. When I asked a tech-savvy friend of mine, "Why are computer and phone things getting so small?" he replied, "Because they are all being built by young people who don't have the same issues older people have. And unfortunately, by the time these young techies become Seniors, you and I will be gone already." So true!

Users have been requesting fixes for the tiny icons and fonts for many years. Despite the user interface deficiencies, I bought APhoto about 3-1/2 years ago because I thought that Affinity's emphasis on non-destructive editing was the "right" model. After a time I memorized locations of the icons and rearranged them to my liking so their tiny size became less problematic. Obviously that depends on the state of your vision, quality of your monitor, and ambient room lighting. Affinity's competitors do not have these particular UI deficiencies, but they do suffer from other deficiencies. As a result, I use APhoto almost exclusively for my hobby work despite my aging eyes. Improvements in Windows 10 helped me overcome Affinity's tiny text. The tiny icons remain a problem. As my late mother often said, "What can you do? You just have to put up with it I guess." Obviously the majority of photo editing enthusiasts choose not to put up with Affinity's deficiencies and lacks. Most people have not heard of Affinity Photo. It often gets no mention in reviews of photo editors. Of course I disregard those reviews because I find reviewers have criteria and priorities different from mine.

I am on a MAC running Big Sur using a 27" Apple Display. I am not on a PC. So your suggestions do not help me, because I cannot find a Control Panel or Preference Panel to change sizes. Is there anyone out there that has this problem fixed on a MAC?

Hi @ABHULtheELF,

If you have the Display in macOS Preferences set to Default for display, you are already seeing the icons at their biggest size. There's no other options other than the ones provided in the Accessibility section which do not help much here.

I use a humane pixel size; 1440p display at 27-inch. That is, it's not small like what could happen with 2160p with 32-inch screen size. That's some small pixels. Those user's of affinity may be struggling even more.

My current improvised solution is to set the thunderbolt resolutionMac system preferences/display) to 2048 x 1152 to make a workable until Serif find a way to solve this issue that many MAC users have when using affinity on larger displays to bring out the best of their photos.

I think part of the problem is that the full colour icons all start to look the same as multiple colours are repeated in many of the icons, with shading and highlights. Setting the icon app preference to monochrome doesn't do much to improve this as now they are all just grayscale versions of the same muddied icons. Providing crisper, simpler, more distinct shapes using a palette of no more than 3-4 colours would help a lot (scalable SVGs would allow for resizable icons that remain crips) . Also having the same tool icons be in similar places on the various app toolbars would help to reinforce their functionality. For instance, the 'hand' (view tool) always being at the bottom above the magnifying glass (zoom tool), or the text tool always being located in the same place, and always having a toggle between frame and artistic text objects. As it stands I find I'm always having to hunt to remember where all the same tools are located in each of the applications.

You know (after 7+ years using these tools), I NEVER knew those options existed as they are not accessed in the way that toolbar customization options are normally accessed on macOS (i.e.: via ctrl + click/right-click). Also, having the applications start with consistent defaults would be more user friendly than requiring users to customize the tools/toolbars for a consistent user-experience.

I think you mean the Context Toolbar. The items in that toolbar change depending on what tool is selected (thus the name). It will be totally empty if there is no document open to provide a context for any tool.

I bought Affinity V1 on the iPad Pro and for my Laptop last week only to find out that they have now discontinued V1 and forcing everyone to pay for V2. The Icons are 6pt size on the iPad and 8pt Size on the laptop and grey on grey and IMPOSSIBLE to see.

If I had known that you couldn't resize the icons and they were REFUSING to fix this, despite it being an accessibility issue so you are discriminating against anyone who wears glasses, I would not have bought this software.

Hi @lforbes,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

Unfortunately it's not possible to change the size of the icons in v2 (other than using the controls provided by the OS to increase the scale of the interface), sorry. Regarding your laptop, are the icons set to Mono (the buttons right above the "Tooltip delay") slider in Affinity Preferences, User Interface section? If so set them to Colour. There's also two new controls/sliders there (Text contrast and UI Brightness) that let you fine tune the contrast a bit.

On iPad, the only way to increase the size of icons/whole interface is through the iPadOS system settings: select Display & Brightness on the left column, go to the Display Zoom section on the bottom on the right column, tap "View" and select Larger Text from the pop-up. Note this will affect all apps.

There's currently a couple bugs when using grids in Affinity apps in that Display Zoom mode (Larger Text) but they should be fixed in the next patch. Hope this helps a bit.

They are pretty familiar to me from using the web app and i.Pad app over the last couple of years.

I found it a bit jarring at first when they appeared for me during testing, but you quicky get used to them.

If it was super easy to do then, meh. If it was a lot of work that could have been better used for actual improvements then I do feel disappointed. It seem to try to bring all of the SU apps together in appearance.

To be clear, I am not against change in any form. I could be happy to welcome a new and improved set of icons for SketchUp Pro. But to receive my support, the essence of the change would need to be a clear step forward in functionality, a change that shows deep understanding and consideration for the needs of the 8 hour a day Professional user, with a design objective to optimize efficiency and clarity.

On my Mac, the cursors for select and dimension are indistinguishable on 2021. On 2017 there is a very subtle shift between a white drop-shadow on the select tool vs a gray one on dimension - but SketchUp (or maybe macOS) often seems to get stuck on one or the other and fails to change back when I change tools.

The icons themselves are stored in a Vectorworks Resource File or .vwr. What you want to do is open up an Explorer window in your main Program Files\Vectorworks 2024 folder. In there, you should find a file called Vectorworks.vwr. Make a copy of this somewhere convenient, then change the .vwr file extension to .zip. This will allow you to extract the contents of the file using whichever software you prefer (I generally just right-click and select Extract All). This will give you access to a whole collection of things but what you're looking at in particular will be in the Images\ToolSets folder.

Important things to note specific to VW2024 is that icons are no longer .png format but instead .svg format. You will no longer need to versions of the icon, one with the @2x suffix for high resolution displays, but you may need a second icon with a _dark suffix for dark mode.

I imagine that if you wanted custom icons for your toolsets, you could extract the .vwr file, convert to .zip, and overwrite the icons in the file. Once you're done, you can re-zip the file, change the file extension back to .vwr, then replace it in the Program File. If you are going to go that route, I strongly recommend backing up a copy of the Vectorworks.vwr file somewhere in case something goes sideways.

@Kevin Allen I am very much on your side and agree with you. Workspace editing could use more than a little work to make things both more streamlined and more customizable. That said, @ChollyO asked a question, and I answered it. I wish I had a better answer, but that's unfortunately the answer. Add a post (or upvote the many, many existing posts) in the Wishlist section.

Am I correct in not seeing several images? For instance, I can't find an image for the tools in toolsets. Meaning, I can find an image for the rigging/braceworks toolset, but no images for truss tool, or hoist tool. That goes for the other toolsets as well. I can find images for the sets, not the images for the seperate tools.

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