The Incredible Shrinking Fonts!
If you spent this weekend wondering whether you were either A) losing your mind or B) going blind from grinding all those Far Seas Ferrin and FSSD Tokens, you’re not alone. I personally experienced a bizarre bug affecting font sizes, specifically an issue where almost all the in-game fonts began to shrink by about 40%. On a 1920×1080 display, EQ2’s fonts are already a little on the smallish side. With this bug, attempting to read quest journal text had me on the phone to my ophthalmologist. Fortunately, after discussion with other players in the Antonia_Bayle.Homeshow channel and through a little bit of testing, I think we’ve gotten to the bottom of what’s causing it.
The new Mission Timers tab in the Quest Journal allows players to see how many hours they’ve got until specific mission timers will reset and they can acquire those quests again. The “Mission” name column in this window seems to have a rather aggressive form of the “ShrinkFontToFit” flag set. If the Quest Journal window happens to be scaled down to its minimum size while the Mission Timers tab is shown and then closed, a cascading change begins to affect nearly ALL in-game text to display it at a reduced size.
Mission Timers at normal size
Mission Timers at reduced size
The effect applies to nearly the entire Character and Guild windows, Quest Details, Item Examine popups, Guild and NPC tags under character names, etc.
A workaround solution for now is to either A) not open the Mission Timers tab, or B) make sure your Quest Journal is sized wide enough to show the Mission Timers text at full size before switching away from the tab/window. If the effect triggers, you can try /load_uisettings, but personally I had to /camp and reload to get back to a sensible font size.
This issue has been passed along to the developers by Ixian who worked out the mechanics of the issue.
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Comments (8)
Ixian
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That Ixian guy is a cool fellow.
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Feldon
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Oh you!
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Ixian
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Saute
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Thank God it wasn’t just me. I thought I had inadvertently changed some UI setting.
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Murfalad
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A weird little bug, I was wondering what caused that!
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Eric T Lewis
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I was about to call my eye doctor to get a checkup, I thought wow my eyes have gotten worse.
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Avithax
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I Play at 2560X1600 and as a member of the Silver Hair Brigade the fonts are already a nightmare. Hopefully now I can wipe the nose print off my monitor.
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7rlsy
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Whew, yeah, glad they’re on it. Over the weekend, when it happened to me, I went straight to the tech forum. When a couple of people suggested the Mission Timers tab, I knew that was it because… I had never looked, out of curiousity, at that tab until right before the shrink-down. I logged, but it’s nice that simple camping will clear it. Even nicer that you posted about it (although typical. heh)
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