BUG REPORT: Font size change on Enteprise theme after upgrade from v5 to v12

[lpolvani]

We recently did a SmartGWT upgrade going from 5.1 (left) to 12.0 (right).

As you can notice in the screenshot the font in the tabs and in the controls seems to be bigger than in the previous release.

[Isomorphic]

There were some intentional design changes, which we blogged about at the time. It looks like this has affected you because you have some components (vertical dividers) that you placed at an absolute pixel position instead of using Layouts. We wouldn't recommend doing this, as subtle differences in font rendering between platforms (or lack of availability of fonts) can mean that some users have been seeing those dividers misplaced all along.

But if you decide you don't want to revise your code in this way, the skinning system lets you reverse the font changes.

[lpolvani]

There were some intentional design changes

Are you telling me that inconsistent default font size between Label and FormItem is a design choice and not a bug?

[Isomorphic]

If you mean that the editable text inside of eg a TextItem is 1px bigger than the form titles, yes that's intentional, because the form titles need to be legible but the editable text needs to be editable, which involves precision placement of the cursor, therefore a larger font size helps (this is HCI stuff).

This difference in size can't actually create your layout issues, which, if you have indeed hardcoded pixel offsets, would be created by any change at all (or by differences in platform rendering, as previously covered).

[lpolvani]

My users are really not happy for this change. Which is the best way to have consistent font sizes?
I should go the CSS way or the JS (isc.Something.changeDefaults) way?

[Isomorphic]

We would expect that they might be unhappy with the screenshot that shows misalignment due to not using layouts. This would be the one and only instance of negative feedback about the actual design changes - what precisely are you getting as feedback here?

All fonts sizes are expressed in CSS, yes. Easily changed with standard CSS techniques.