[LAU] Sliders and knobs once again, was: Re: ZynAddSubFX Usability Survey

[Tim E. Real]

On Friday, April 29, 2016 10:33:47 PM EDT Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> On 29.04.2016 08:53, Tim E. Real wrote:
> > We now have MusE-3 with horizontal Compact Sliders.
> > The text is inside the slider like Ardour.
> 
> Since it's gathering dust otherwise, I may just throw this exploration
> on sliders and knobs in:
> http://i.imgur.com/7TmBmp9.png
> 
> There's color coding for in-negative range, exact-zero,
> in-positive-range and maximum (the negative extreme is missing!).


Wow, those are very nice.

I like that the primary eye-catching part of the 'bar' is /below/ 
 the text while the part /behind/ the text is more gentle, subtle,
 allowing the text to dominate.

I really struggled with that, and am still not quite happy.
My bar colour is solid throughout the bar and I had trouble
 making the text stand out. 
Our default font for our strips is 7 pt (adjustable). 
Pretty small, so that we can fit a lot of strips in the mixer.
I had to resort to some tricks.
Since many distros have now disabled all bitmapped fonts just 
 to satisfy certain applications, it looks very dim and weak 
 at that size.
So I had to force the use of a Sans aliased font there (adjustable).
It's brighter and sharper.
I also used text shadowing (draw it twice) so it stands out.

Seems that out of /all/ the fonts on my system, Sans was the 
 only one that looked even remotely good at an aliased 7 pt.

Thanks very much for the tips!
Tim.