FR935 - font not small enough

I'm laying out the GUI design for a full screen data field on a FR 935. I'm using "FONT_XTINY" for the field labels, but it's not small enough, the text is too wide. Is there a way to use a smaller font without going to custom fonts?

Also the User Experience Guide doesn't list the 935 fonts. Where do I find that information? Can I assume it is the same as Fenix 5? Here you can see that "XTINY" and "TINY" are the same at size of 26.

Constant Name Font Name Font Size Bold
FONT_XTINY Roboto Condensed Regular 26
FONT_TINY Roboto Condensed Bold 26
FONT_SMALL Roboto Condensed Bold 29
FONT_MEDIUM Roboto Condensed Bold 34
FONT_LARGE Roboto Condensed Bold 41

Any help would be appreciated.

jim_m_58 over 7 years ago

Yeah, I agree custom fonts aren't too hard once you know the drill... Using them for icons is a nice trick indeed btw!

But is there also an easy way to 'scale' fonts? Or create custom fonts which are half width of the original one? I know it is possible using an image editor to scale the png generated by bmfont and manually editing the corresponding .fnt file but that's pretty tedious (and sometimes tricky).

For icons, they are really nice. You want to change the color, you just change the color in the code, while if you use bitmaps for icons, you might need a few variants in the resources.

As far as variable sizes, I have a couple watchfaces (Fontless and Simple Digital 2) and a data field (Simple Data field), were I'm completely free on the size of the numbers. I draw them myself. Make the seconds proportional to the hh:mm, and the size of those is based on the device and screen. Even change the height if a move bar needs to be displayed in some cases. Fontless took this to an extreme. It uses no fonts (native or custom) and no bitmaps. Everything is just draws....

flocsy🤠 over 1 year ago

Strangely I have the same problem 7 years later on some of the latest devices (edgeexplore2, fr965) where the DF labels I draw using FONT_XTINY are bigger than the labels of the built-in fields.

Does anyone know a publicly available font (maybe on githib) that can be used for this?

jim_m_58 over 1 year ago in reply to flocsy🤠

On some devices with CIQ you can use scalable fonts, and set the height you want in your app. On others, you use a ttf file and bmfont, and create a custom custom font the size you want. To find the ttf, you can just do a simple search for something like "roboto font download".

If you search the discussion forum you find lots of info about custom fonts as they are used in many watch faces.

Here's one of the sites I use when looking for something interesting for a watch face: https://www.1001freefonts.com/

Not all fonts that the platform uses are exposed in CIQ on all devices, so if you want something different in your app, I'd first look at custom fonts. I know someone that tends to use them for all different app types and not just watch faces to make mult-device support easier.. And you don't need anything in jungles and just use resourse overrides like

resources-round-240x240

(all round devices with a 240x240 display)

resources-semiround

(devices like the fr23x, 630, 735)

flocsy🤠 over 1 year ago in reply to jim_m_58

The problem with this is this just adds one more thing that I'll need to figure out for each device. Currently I am more or less figuring this out from the simulator.json (both the font and the location for the label). It doesn't work too well, but if I'll use custom fonts then it basically means that I'll need to find out the font size for each device (and in case of datafields for each field...) Maybe it will be easier to find a good shrink and I'll care less about pixel perfectionism :)

mcinner1 over 1 year ago in reply to flocsy🤠

Regarding Edge Explore 2 I was in contact with a user who owns the device (me not...), and I found out that the fonts on the real Explor 2 are much smaller as in simulator shown...

But the next bigger fonts of the device were too big.
So I build my own customer fonts.
Advantage of customer fonts: they look absolutely identical on Sim and Device.

flocsy🤠 over 1 year ago in reply to mcinner1

I understand, and that's a perfect solution for a full screen app/DF but I have a few Datafields that only take 1 spot in the layout so they are shown next to the other, default fields like time, distance, pace, etc, that's why I try to be as similar as possible (on the other hand I also change the label dynamically, so I can't use SimpleDataField)

Possible fixes:

- shouldn't care, nobody notices the difference except me

- should start creating full screen Datafields

- shouldn't change label => use SimpleDataField

- map the label font sizes for each device, field (I do this partially from simulator.json but it's a mess and isn't perfect)