From: Rolf H. <rh...@fl...> - 2008-11-03 19:29:08
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Hi all, I experimented with the automatic font scaling options introduced in Jmol 11.5.x. Principally it is a very nice feature that overcomes some of the problems with the deafault fixed size fonts. But there is at least one major drawback that prevents general use (e.g. in our Jmol viewer): memory consumption. After zooming in on a middle sized protein structure with some labels the memory usage went up from 22 MB to 89 MB (default font size, labelScaleReference 0.15). With 96 MB or even only 64 MB of default maximum Java memory this will easily lead to a lot of out of memory problems (and actually did). A part of the memory consumption will be of course by the zooming itself, but I never observed any out of memory error while zooming before. So unfortunately the feature is rather useless except for special purposes with experienced users aware of the problem and a lot of Java memory. Thinking about the problem I got the following ideas that might help to improve the labeling at different sizes: 1) What do you think about an adjustable maximum font size limit, preventing to generate extremely large fonts which need a lot of memory? 2) I dont't know how this is handled right now. But if it is not already done it might help to throw away intermediate font sizes. 3) One of the major drawbacks of the fixed font sizes is that the labels are covered with increasing zoom by the renderings (spacefill, cartoon etc.). This problem is solved with the automatically scaled fonts because the offset is scaled also. What do you think about a mixture of the two methods: don't scale the font automatically but only the offsets? Regards, Rolf |