change search box's font size?

Apparently, there's no way to change the search box's font size. I'd like to be able to do this so that, in portrait mode, I can show other buttons (history, dictionary, add to flashcards, etc.) while still being able to see pinyin input. With tone numbers, pinyin input can frequently reach 12 slots, sometimes more.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
JimmyTheSaint said:
Apparently, there's no way to change the search box's font size. I'd like to be able to do this so that, in portrait mode, I can show other buttons (history, dictionary, add to flashcards, etc.) while still being able to see pinyin input. With tone numbers, pinyin input can frequently reach 12 slots, sometimes more.

Not difficult, but I'm skeptical as to whether you could get enough extra characters from it to make a difference - the text would have to be *really* small, to the point where it would be almost unusable for Chinese character input. It would be better to simply make the buttons smaller on the Note, which would be very tricky in Android 2.3 but which we can look at doing once most Note users have gotten upgraded to Android 4.0. (sadly not likely to happen until Q3 given the slow pace of carrier firmware upgrade rollouts)
 
I never input Chinese characters, always pinyin. There might be other characterless people. For the definition screen, I have the headword font size set to 16 and body font size set to 12, and these are significantly smaller than what appears in the input box.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
JimmyTheSaint said:
I never input Chinese characters, always pinyin. There might be other characterless people. For the definition screen, I have the headword font size set to 16 and body font size set to 12, and these are significantly smaller than what appears in the input box.

The question remains of whether that would make enough of a difference in the width to let you fit in significantly more characters - I don't think you could have all of those buttons with 12 characters' worth of Pinyin without the font being ridiculously small, at which point you're not really any better off than you would be with the text scrolling off the screen (since you'd be unable to see what you'd entered clearly either way).
 
My 12 point font in my definitions looks like it would fit about 25 characters in the space that the present search box fits 8 characters. The 12 point font in the definition window might be too small for some people, but if we had the option to reduce the size in the entry window, then it would help. If I could reduce the font so that the entry window held 15 characters with three buttons present, then that would still be bigger than my definition window's 12 point font. 15 slots would hold any three pinyin syllables plus tone numbers--a more workable maximum.

Consider this: anyone who uses the settings to set the definition and word list to allowably small fonts is already holding their phone close enough to read that stuff. In that case, they're quite prepared to have the entry window approach that same smallness. It's odd that we can change the fonts in the other places, but can't change the entry window's font to match.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
JimmyTheSaint said:
Consider this: anyone who uses the settings to set the definition and word list to allowably small fonts is already holding their phone close enough to read that stuff. In that case, they're quite prepared to have the entry window approach that same smallness. It's odd that we can change the fonts in the other places, but can't change the entry window's font to match.

That's true, and the same basic argument for why we make so many other things customizable - namely that there are too many devices floating around with weird form factors like the Note and we can't reasonably accommodate them all with our default settings - applies to the search field too. We can certainly investigate this, though it may turn out that changing the font size complicates the interface layout enough that it's not feasible - at the very least we'd probably have to cap it at whatever its current size is as a maximum, since any larger is going to cause weird line-wrapping behavior and leave people with an interface that feels decidedly buggy.
 
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