The difference in font size between the words in a sentence and the cloze hint is enormous. Since neither font size is configurable, the user’s only way of making the cloze hint easier to see is to zoom the browser, which makes the words in the sentence even larger. This means they take up more room than necessary on the screen, forcing other compromises.
By default, the font sizes could be made closer, but that might leave some people dissatisfied, since the cloze hint would then be more likely to block a word. Making both configurable might keep more people happy.
It might also be worthwhile to consider other places to put the cloze hint, especially given the amount of empty space in the window. I wouldn’t find it a problem to have the cloze hint physically separated from the cloze field. If this were done, making the font sizes configurable might not be necessary.
It would be nice to be able to configure font family as well as size, but I’m just hoping that it will be possible to configure these properties separately for main sentences and for reference sentences. @mike, does that seem feasible?
I believe the different in font size between cloze hints and the text has only gotten larger since yesterday’s update. This means that if you magnify the cloze hint enough to read it easily, the regular text is so large that it’s hard to read in one piece. Can you please give some serious consideration to making these separately configurable?
@mike, could you please comment on this? I still find the difference in font size, and impossibility of configuring it, a major source of eyestrain and/or inconvenience. My eyes are still (barely) able to deal with the problem, but I can imagine some people not being able to use Clozemaster at all due to this.
UPDATE: More recently, I’ve been mostly using categories like “>50,000 Most Common” and “Fluency Fast Track”, which don’t use cloze hints. Now it’s the difference in font size between sentence and translation that bothers me.
@mike The fact that the “Notes” font size cannot be controlled is still a problem. The most important information that I store in this field is the location of the stress mark, and when the sentence and translation are too large to fit on the screen, the accent mark within the “Notes” field ends up being about one pixel large, so it’s at the very limit of visibility. Could you please add an option to control this font size, the same way you did for “Hints”?
There are at least two issues here that impede readability:
(1) The font size for the “Notes” field, unlike the “Translation” and “Hint” fields, cannot be configured, so there’s no control over it.
(2) The main sentence text is different from all the other fields in that it has two possible sizes: one when the browser window is small and one when it’s large. You can see this by starting with the window small and then making it progressively larger. You’ll see the font size for the main sentence text suddenly jump, whereas the font size for the other fields stays fixed. But the main sentence never needs to be enlarged to be seen, whereas the other fields, especially the Notes field, do. So the intuitive action that one takes when trying to make the Notes text larger (stretching the window) just makes things worse. It makes the large text still larger, even to the point where the sentence no longer fits on the screen, while the small text remains just as unreadably small as it ever was.
As a secondary point, the fact that there are two possible sizes for the main text makes the translation and hint font size settings harder to understand: 1x relative to what? The smaller main text font size or the larger one?
For your first point, I would personally be very happy with the suggestion you made back in March of a combined hints/notes configuration option (even though you described it as “less ideally”).
The main reason I would think that someone (e.g. me!) would want to configure the size is for readability, in which case I expect a person would want to make both of them bigger.
I can’t think of a compelling reason why I’d want them to be different sizes (unless someone wanted to keep the hint smaller so that it doesn’t clutter/confuse them while filling in the Cloze).
We’ll have to spend some more time with font sizes at some point as well as the resize issue, but a Notes Font Size game setting has been added on the web as holdover solution to your first point
Mike, I really appreciate your implementing this. I tried it out, but unfortunately, I wasn’t sure that I could see a difference, even when I tried using both Chrome and Firefox on Windows.
Here are the issues:
I’m not sure when the change is supposed to take effect: immediately after pressing the “Close” button for the settings dialog, during the current round, during the next round, or after closing the web browser and coming back to Clozemaster. I tried all of these, but didn’t see much of a difference, if any.
Given that you have helpfully added accented pronunciations in Cyrillic to the “Pronunciation” field for Russian, this field is now more important to me than the “Notes” field. (Whenever I fix the pronunciation by adding or moving an accent mark, I not only submit a request for a change, but change it in the “Pronunciation” field for my local copy of the sentence.) So the “Notes” field is not filled out for most sentences ahead of time. To do the experiment, I tried adding the pronunciation to the “Notes” field when I had the sentence open, but that required editing the entry, and combined with my confusion on point 1 about when I should see the changes, I wasn’t sure I was seeing the setting reflected in what was shown.
I’m glad to hear that you are planning to look at font sizes and resizing in more detail. Ultimately, that probably makes more sense than adding a new setting for each field.
For some languages, configurable font sizes for “Pronunciation” and “Notes” fields are even more important than for Russian. Here is a sentence in Hebrew to which I’ve added pronunciations for my private use:
The pronunciations contain vowels (the dots and dashes below the letters). They’re almost impossible to read, even though I’ve set the “Notes” font size to 3x. I sometimes use the magnification feature on Windows (Windows key plus the + key) to magnify these fields, but because they’re so tiny to begin with, they look blurry when they’re magnified:
@mike, since you’ve been on a roll in terms of addressing the backlog of requests, I’m hoping you can take another look at this one. Basically, as it is, the pronunciation field is hard to see, especially for people using small devices and/or whose eyesight is not perfect (which is probably a significant portion of your user base), and effectively unreadable for people whose eyesight is poor. Given that you’ve already added customizable font size multipliers for translation, hint, and notes, I imagine that adding one of exactly the same type for pronunciation should be straightforward. However, if you happen to have additional time to work with, I think it could make sense to widen the range of possibilities (for instance, add 4x to the existing 1x, 1.5x, 2x, and 3x) and/or use a slider to allow the user to select a value from a continuous range. It would also be nice if the settings box could show the sizes of the fields relative to each other without the user having to go back to the sentence itself to try it out. But I would be happy without all these if there were just a setting for the pronunciation font size.
Thanks for your persistence @alanf_us and apologies for the lack of progress on this one! Please give us a few weeks, will see what we can do, at the very least for pronunciation font size in the web app like you mentioned.
@alanf_us new game settings in the web app Any issues or anything we missed please let us know of course.
At some point it could be cool to have a way to select a font from Google Fonts for the sentence text. Example available for Cyrillic, Browse Fonts - Google Fonts. Not sure if/when we might get to it though.
@mike, I’m thrilled that you made this change. I gave it a try, and it works perfectly. This will make my Clozemaster experience more pleasant every day. Thank you so much!
Any issues or anything we missed please let us know of course.