hey,
Actually I saw that yesterday night and wanted to test but haven’t had the opportunity. I’ll make sure I find the time this weekend and will report accordingly.
Thanks for the good work ! 
crowded how ?
Goals :
- Keep the emphasis on the picture
- Minimize details and distractions out of the picture
- Minimize every chance of optical illusions due to picture/UI interactions (ie frames, drop shadows, excessive contrast with background)
- Squeeze as much text as possible in as little space as possible (with respect to legibility) to respect 1.
- Take advantage of high DPI screens (HD 1080, 2.5 K and 4 K)
- Ensure that controls (buttons, etc.) look different than labels (info, titles, etc.) and are easily distinguishable.
- Make the current control stands out from the others (because it gets the keyboard focus).
It’s good that dt tries to serve users with limited means and below average gear, but at some point, photography is a graphic art and needs proper tools to be done properly, including a proper screen. An HD 720 screen and below is not a proper graphic arts tool. dt is a raw photographs processor, raw photographs mainly come out of 350 € and counting cameras, so if users don’t have another 120-150 € to spend on a decent screen, let’s call them irrational human beings with an illed-designed graphic chain.
But this question bissects with:
“are we doing a photo software for IT guys doing some photography on the side or are we doing a photo software for actual photographers ?”.
I’m working to make dt a professional tool because enthusiasts are not the crowd that makes a soft progress, and enthusiast users are more willing to accept the complexity of an advanced soft once they have seen what the pros are able to get from it (photoshop).
The current one is already supposed to be condensed. Have you checked the DPI settings in darktablerc and Gnome screen scaling factor ? In darktablerc, it should be set to -1 (system default), and in Gnome, it should be set to whatever suits you (be carefull, in Gnome Tweaks, to set the font scaling factor to 1.00).
Goals aren’t the issue. The contention is what a met objective would look like.
Sorry for not getting back to you earlier. I’ve pulled the latest master and there are a few things that are really weird.
I’m getting 3 times out of 4 a seg fault a few seconds following the startup like this :
Magick: abort due to signal 11 (SIGSEGV) "Segmentation Fault"... Abort trap: 6
When it does not crash, the icons are still misaligned. I’m starting to think that there might be another old css somewhere that it must use… But I’m cleaning stuff before each build so I’m not sure.
First few times it ran, I had the date and time displayed correctly in the lighttable, but after 3 of 4 crashes, the Japanese-like symbols came back.
2nd preview window is still showing the selected picture full screen, but when it’s done rendering, it shows the (rendered) picture with half size, so taking up 1/4 of the space available…
Not more luck on the openCL side of things, still unable to compile lut3d.cl even after 15 restarts…
A lot is going on and as a result I’m unable to use the sw right now 
@anon41087856 Would you know what font size is used to display the year in the histogram below the lighttable ? Would you also know the size used to display the image information for instance ? Just trying to make sense of what I see on my screen…
First thing : it’s impossible that all issues you see are from darktable code. I follow regularly pull request and issues posted on Github, I’m on the main site and french forum about darktable and here, I never see that. Icons are normally not misaligned (I change as I’ve said alignment of iop icons. I have even made these last days new corrections and improvements from other issues I see (doesn’t include icons alignment) and this was follow by some people and corrected many things. I have also made myself for that quite a lot of tests (with a quite rainy week-end from last one, I have spend some time). And like for previous time, for interface issues, a capture screen is better.
Also, I don’t understand how you could have these “japanese-like” symbols. So, on what you describe, two possibilities I see : compiling issues on your system or MacOs issues. And for that, only developers who use MacOs could help and I’m not sure but they are one or two if I remember (except erdgadoh, don’t know who).
About 2nd preview, there’s a work in progress (a pull request) and issues about 2nd preview window on MacOs, on the github page : https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/2569
but you certainly know that as it seems issue related is from you.
What I’m sure is, on Linux at least, all issues you described doesn’t exist (at least on my OS but from what I see, no one else describe that).
I will respond to question you asked to @anon41087856 as I also works on css so really know it great. Text font sizes you are emphasis (all), those you ask are on main value=1em, so the real size is related to default font size used (OS one for darktable.css, Roboto or next one used for elegant themes).
Ok, first and foremost, please let me apologise for my previous message. As I’m reading it again, I’m realising just now how it sounds and I’m sorry about that. I’m grateful that this software exists and for all the hardwork that you guys are putting upfront to make it even better.
My frustration got the upside of things (and yes maybe the rain helped also) and I didn’t mean to criticise the software. I’m facing too many little issues so I’m certain it’s on me. I need to figure out why this is happening so I can learn how to fix it.
Now there are positive things. As it turns out, Edgardoh pushed some changes that worked for me and the 2nd preview window, so that’s one thing . I’m getting less crash than yesterday (absolutely no idea why and if someone would like to know more maybe I can run some kind of command that I don’t know about to have a log of what’s going on ? I don’t know). The openCL thing is more annoying because it’s very slow without it, even more I guess because of the resolution. I’ll focus on this first.
As for the css and font size etc, there is clearly something dodgy going on on my system as in I’m almost certain all your great work in the recent commits, I’m almost sure, somehow, is not being taken into account. Maybe this is because I have 2.6.2 alongside the master. I don’t know but this is why I said I need to understand so I can fix it. The only aim of my previous message was a callout to anybody who’s been through the same on Mac, if any (because there are fair chances that all these little things are Mac specific) and who could advise about what I should try next.
Again, sorry, and please keep up the great work while I try to catch up on things
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Good on you for this. Frustration happens to all of us!
Normally for managing fonts, fontconfig is used. Fontconfig has a system and a user config file where you can define which fonts should be used as fallback if a symbol in a font is not available. It might be that you have installed a Japanese font which is used as fallback! This means you need to configure your system correctly!
I’ll check that but I have never installed such a font. In fact I’ve bought my mac 3 months ago and still trying to find my way around. There is very little to no customization on this machine.
I did install on the other hand all the Roboto fonts, and am using MacPorts to compile the master.
What I discover last night while trying with the GTK debug tool is that for instance, the left panel seems to be using a font size at 1em, but it is not. If I change this interactively using the GTK debugger from 1 to 0.99, there it all adjusts and the font size looks on par with my resolution, which was not the case before.
A consequence of that is the misalignment of the icons (using the icon theme) that i could still see. Somehow they are centered IF the font size is 1em (which is the case when I set 0.99).
To give an idea, once I’ve adjusted the size in the GTK debugger tool, I cannot go to the previous size it was using unless I fiddle more with the value. I find that the 1.4 param is roughly reflecting what I see when I compile the latest master and just start DT with any of the theme.
I’m planning on opening an issue to give maybe more details and screenshots, but I can’t do that now. In short, the 1em fontsize value is somehow not taken into account, and it falls back on something else which looks similar to 1.4em. How and why, no idea yet, I4m just reporting what I see.
As for the japenese symbol I have no idea, but I’ll provide screenshots like I said.
Thanks for the tips
Congratulations to the great advances in the UI! Maybe this could be as opportunity to tackle an issue which might be taboo, but here it goes. Could there be an option in the preferences to render module names and general interface in Title Case instead of lowercase ? I happen to read better and quicker if my eyes find the first letter in Title Case. UI.
It’s not taboo and I agree: Capitalize labels in UI · Issue #2078 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub
Although an option for that is unnecessary clutter in the preferences and it should be just that.
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For me it’s all about shape recognition. A more concise capitalised title is far easier to read as it has a more distinct shape. If I have to stop and actually read the titles it takes a lot longer and I end up with eye strain a lot sooner. But not everyone will agree…
I mentioned before about being able to edit the module titles but it wasn’t really picked up on. But capitalising is only half the key and maybe there should be a module names file to load a users prefered names.
I agree it is not taboo. Personally lower-case is just fine to me.
Fact is changing this would be an earthquake on the code and will invalidate all translations. So I suppose we certainly want some automatic tools to handle that. But I’m wondering if CSS has an option to capitalize, lower or upper-case labels? Not sure, but if this is possible then for sure we will avoid the earthquake and we could see this happening sooner than later or… never!
all lowercase → Title Case → Sentence case → Darktable?!
ABJECT HORROR 
So I guess we’ll now be seeing for each theme:
theme.css
theme-caps.css
theme-icons.css
theme-icons-caps.css
theme-elegant.css
theme-elegant-caps.css
theme-elegant-icons.css
theme-elegant-icons-caps.css
You forgot Better Contrast for Old Eyes &c.
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CSS supports it, but GTK does not support all CSS 3 rules, and namely not this one.
Never forget that GTK is a disgrace, constantly deprecating functions introduced a couple of minor versions before, advocating for spaghetti code, and offering half-baked functionnalities that will never get a chance to go in stable version because there is none (3.24 is still bugged, but 4.0 is already WIP). So much for a lib born in the late 1990’s and supposed to be a cornerstone for opensource applications. I’m beginning to think GTK exists only to make Qt shine.
[/rant over]
Coming to your local furniture store 
: @Marctwo’s csstable. @Claes’ antiquetable. @anon41087856’s qttable.
4 Likes
AFAIK that has been addressed by a merged commit by @rabauke but the related issue is still open…