Hi, Tim.

> Microscopic font sizes on a high-dpi screen and not antialiased (I submitted 
> a pull request to fix this almost a year ago - 
> https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/1446 )

I'd love to get this particular problem resolved. My hunch is that this can 
definitively be solved from NetBeans, with no need to wait for upstream JDK 
changes. But I think it needs to be done by setting the Swing HiDPI scaling 
constants, not by messing around with the NetBeans fontsize setting (which will 
affect font sizes but not sizes of icons and other graphics).

I left a comment in the PR ( https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/1446 ) 
with some questions a while back--would be great to get your thoughts and if 
you could test the piece of test code there.

-- Eirik

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Boudreau <[email protected]> 
Sent: Saturday, August 8, 2020 11:57 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Post-install user experience

In order to double check that my update server had complete dependencies, I 
installed a freshly-built build from master a couple of days ago and ran it on 
a clean userdir - same experience anyone downloading it for the first time will 
have.

Issues:
 - Microscopic font sizes on a high-dpi screen and not antialiased (I submitted 
a pull request to fix this almost a year ago -
https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/1446 )
 - J2SE projects (Ant-based) are not recognized.  On using Open File to open a 
file in such a project, I get the admonishment to install nb-javac
 - After installing nb-javac, J2SE Ant-based projects are *still* not enabled 
and such projects are not recognized (maven projects are)

Basically, unless you're a netbeans expert, you are not going to know about, or 
easily find information on
 - Adding -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd_hrgb to $NB_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf
 - Adding --fontsize nn to $NB_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf
 - Manually enabling J2SE projects and dependencies in Tools | Plugins - a new 
user doesn't know what a plugin is.

Are we just producing builds for NetBeans experts, and we don't care if anyone 
else uses it?  Because this is a recipe for "I installed it and I couldn't read 
the text and couldn't open anything.  It's junk.  Don't bother with it."  If we 
have the slightest ambition of releasing professional-quality software, failing 
to fix low-hanging-fruit problems any new user is going to encounter in the 
first five minutes using it and have no idea how to fix is totally, totally 
unacceptable.

Do *not* reply with "Well, some nice vendor is going to create their own 
distribution and fix the user experience."  It's a cop-out and in fact nobody 
is doing that.

-Tim

--
http://timboudreau.com

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