#1454 Mac toolbar rendering is slightly blurry

[Luke Symes]

Minsky version: 3.0.0-rc.3
Platform: Mac OS Monterey 12.3.1

Issue: On Mac, my toolbar rendering is slightly blurry. See attached screenshot. Text on the canvas is much crisper in comparison. Note that I have a Macbook Pro with Retina screen.

This is a cosmetic issue but I think fixing it would make Minsky look much slicker for Mac users, who often care about these things ;)

[High Performance Coder]

The Indian dev team just reused the bitmap icons used in the TCL/Tk version.
Most of these can be regenerated in SVG, but there will be a few items that are more tricky, such as the "note" icon.

However, I will backlog this, I don't see it as essential for 3.0 release.

[Luke Symes]

Agree re the bitmap icons for "wiring operations". But this was not my main concern actually - it was the text rendering.

E.g. in the screenshot, zoom to 100%. Look at the text rendering of the tab labels e.g. "Wiring", "Equations", "Parameters", "Variables", "Plots", "Godleys" - these are blurry. Compare with the text rendering on the canvas of the parameters/variables and plot titles/labels - these are crisp.

I suspect the DPI setting of the toolbar/tabs might need to be fixed to use the same DPI settings of the Canvas?

[Luke Symes]

Maybe this could be part of the answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/59400984. This suggests adding "zoomFactor: 1.0 / factor" to webPreferences here:
https://github.com/highperformancecoder/minsky/blob/66da5a386dbcc99a543c7837c58f983380dd59d5/gui-js/apps/minsky-electron/src/app/app.ts#L86-L102

I would test this out myself if I had the build environment set up (would like to but haven't had time). I suspect this could be related to this commit for the scale factor of the canvas making the canvas look right but not affecting the rest of the app: https://github.com/highperformancecoder/minsky/commit/125fa43ceff91ec27dd843cbdabfd9aa64f6f015

[Luke Symes]

Managed to get a build environment running on my Mac, and commenting out this line fixes the "fonts being blurry" issue for me with my Retina display: https://github.com/highperformancecoder/minsky/blob/cc99a838e6e441ba4f3465108d0cbe369e7b04ea/gui-js/apps/minsky-electron/src/app/app.ts#L213

[High Performance Coder]

Yes - but that will bugger up the scaling calculations on the canvas. Mouse events get reported with the wrong coordinates.