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Index › Processing Development › Core,  Processing Development Environment (PDE) › PDE use with low resolution display
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PDE use with low resolution display (Read 2214 times)
schill
PDE use with low resolution display
Feb 15th, 2008, 5:52pm  
I've looked, but haven't been able to find anything relating to this:

I'm running the PDE on a display with a resolution of only 800x480 (an ASUS EEEPC).  The PDE form does not really like this low resolution.

I can drag the window smaller to fit in the display, but then the text area and message area at the bottom disappear and the text editor area does not scale appropriately.

It appears that there is a minimum size for the text editor somewhere.  When you drag the window smaller, it does not allow the text editor to get smaller than that value - and the text area and message area remain hidden below it (outside the window).

I have found a way to change the config file to get my default window size smaller, but then I lose the other two areas.

Is there a way to control the minimum size of the text editor so that I can see every area on the screen at once, without needing to drag the window up and down?

Or, is there a way to display the text area in a separate terminal window instead of as part of the PDE?

The size of my display really limits what can be seen at one time, but it's definitely usable and is very convenient.
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ddf
Re: PDE use with low resolution display
Reply #1 - Feb 16th, 2008, 6:21pm  
Hey cool, I've also installed Processing on my Eee. What I did was I went into preferences.txt and changed the default window size and the font size. Here's what I changed:

default.window.width=800
editor.font-Monospaced,plain,10
default.window.height=480
header.text.font=SansSerif,plain,10
button.status.font=SansSerif,plain,10
status.font=SansSerif,plain,10
linestatus.font=SansSerif,plain,10
console.font=Monospaced,plain,11

As for the terminal window question, if you launch processing from a terminal window, all text that goes to the console will also go to the terminal window you launched processing from. Also, looking through the prefs file again, there is a line that looks like this

console=true

Presumably, if you change that to false, it won't have a console window. Then you'd just launch from a terminal and check in that when you wanted to see console output from Processing. I have found that the console spew in the terminal can slow down sketches run from the PDE, but that may have been due to text winding up in two places and may not be an issue if it is only going to the terminal window.

Hope that helps!
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ddf
Re: PDE use with low resolution display
Reply #2 - Feb 16th, 2008, 6:26pm  
Ok, should have tried before posting. Making the line

console=false

just makes it not spew anything to the console in the PDE, but it doesn't get rid of it.

There doesn't seem to be a setting that does that, though it would be a nice one to have.

EDIT: Looking at the source, it does not do any preference checking before creating the console portion of the PDE, so this would be a new feature to allow running without it.
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schill
Re: PDE use with low resolution display
Reply #3 - Feb 18th, 2008, 2:52pm  
Thanks.  I've been using some of those changes to preferences.txt myself.

I've also used a terminal window as an "external" console as well, although my normal start process doesn't create one.  The limitations of the screen size make this awkward sometimes - depending on the sizes of my different windows.

I'd like to be able to drag the console half of the PDE window as large or small as necessary depending on what I'm doing at the time - without hitting the apparent minimum allowed editor size.  The size does not seem to be a function of text size, or if it is it's more complicated than I've figured out.  I know that I can make it so that some text is not visible (i.e., the window is chopped off by the console).

Thanks again.
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