Certain themes suddenly started misaligning text selections in EmulationStation

[BuZz]

@TMNTturtlguy

no worries.

nes-mini/famicom mini author requested the changes to workaround an issue hence they were to be changed. So just your theme and the other one are affected. Most themes still work fine. It wasn't intentional that other themes would be broken by the change.

If you want to be closely involved in ES development you will need to follow it on github though as that's where the development happens (and for example the ES theme docs are updated etc).

[pjft]

@TMNTturtlguy No bother. We know that written communication in forums is easily misinterpreted, I usually assume the best intent from everyone :)

Hope work is going well, and that you get some rest and family time this weekend.

Best!

[mattrixk]

Does anyone have the github link where the new selectorHeight stuff is discussed? Are there any examples of how it's supposed to be used? Will themes break in older versions of ES if selectorHeight is used, or does it need to be used in a <feature> tag?

[jdrassa]

@mattrixk Here is the forum topic here the changes were discussed.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/10435/long-standing-es-bugs/

Here is a link to the theme documentation on github.
https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/master/THEMES.md#textlist

By default selectorHeight is set to 1.5 times the size of the font, with the text aligned to be roughly in the the center . This matches the previous hard-coded behavior in ES. The main usage scenario is if you are using the existing lineSpacing option (which previously did not function properly), and want the selector bar to be taller then the default size.

In the case of MetaPixel, with the current state of ES you would want to use lineSpacing to adjust the spacing of the list items and then use selectorHeight to increase the height. However, I do plan to investigate the issue and hopefully come up with a way of fixing it. Currently, there isn't <feature>tag support for these options, and using either of the new options would break older versions of ES. If I can't come up with a good fix, i can always double back to add them. One option for now, would be to use the last feature that was added, which I believe would be "z-index". The changes would still break your theme for an user who has updated to a build with z-index support, but the not the latest, but those users are probably more likely/willing to update ES again if something isn't working properly.

@TMNTturtlguy the effect that this has on your Comic theme is very minor. Essentially the text of the selected item appears a couple of pixels lower, but still completely within the selector bar.

There are ways that we can generate a change log from the git history. When I find time, I may try to look into semi-automating the process.

[TMNTturtlguy]

@jdrassa Thanks for the explanation/info. At this point it appears that without adding in the new selector height information I cannot modify my text list. As you said, at least the text is within the selector bar. I think it has to do with the font type itself. Not sure why it would have been centered in the selector bar just like all the other fonts, but now it is not?

@ruckage I downloaded font forage to see if i could modify the text to move all of the font above the horizontal baseline, however I cannot seam to figure out how to successfully do this. I can set the amount they can move above or below, but not tell them all to simply move up above the baseline. My thought is that if the font is floating above the baseline, I can recenter the font within the existing selector bar. Do you have any ideas for me on how i might accomplish this? Thanks

[ruckage]

I'm sorry, I'm partially to blame for this it seems as these changes were kindly made by @jdrassa at my request. They are however worthwhile as previously the gamelist had several bugs which meant it didn't behave how it was supposed to and now it does. I knew it would mess up my theme because I was using some hacks to get it to behave how I wanted but didn't realise it would impact other themes as well.
Any changes needed though should be minor but the new tags obviously aren't supported in older versions of ES.

@TMNTturtlguy said in Certain themes suddenly started misaligning text selections in EmulationStation:

@ruckage I downloaded font forage to see if i could modify the text to move all of the font above the horizontal baseline, however I cannot seam to figure out how to successfully do this. I can set the amount they can move above or below, but not tell them all to simply move up above the baseline. My thought is that if the font is floating above the baseline, I can recenter the font within the existing selector bar. Do you have any ideas for me on how i might accomplish this? Thanks

That's actually very similar to what I had to do originally to get my gamelist to work properly though in my case it was because linespacing was broken in ES. It's late here at the moment but leave it with me and I will have a look at the font tomorrow and see if I can do anything to help.

[TMNTturtlguy]

@ruckage thank you so much sir! @jdrassa fix and your request are well worth it. I plan to use it in the future. Thanks for your help.

[ruckage]

@TMNTturtlguy said in Certain themes suddenly started misaligning text selections in EmulationStation:

@ruckage thank you so much sir! @jdrassa fix and your request are well worth it. I plan to use it in the future. Thanks for your help.

Who needs sleep zzzzzzzzzz, sorry where was I ;)

I've modified the font by moving all the character up and it looks like it fixes the problem and doesn't seem to break the alignment in older versions of ES either. I'm not 100% sure, I have so many versions of ES now I'm losing track a bit - I'm not very organized :). I've tested it in a few different versions though including what I believe is the latest version and the gamelist text is centered on the selector bar on all of them.

You can download the font from mega: fixed font

It is a really hacky fix however so should probably be fixed correctly in the future but as long as it works that's the main thing, let me know how it goes.

It 3.40am now so I'm off to bed.

[ruckage]

@TMNTturtlguy
Hi, have you had a chance to try out the fixed font I posted?

[TMNTturtlguy]

@ruckage hey! I am traveling a lot for work right now and don't have access to my pi. I won't be able to test until Sunday night :(

Thank you so much for taking your time to help me. I will test as soon as I get home and let you know how it works.

Edit: also, thank you so much for staying up so late to work on this. I really appreciate. Do you have a good resource on how to use font forge? Or just their site? I would like to try to learn these tricks! Thanks again.

[jdrassa]

I have a working fix. I just need to test it out with some more themes to verify there are no additional negative effects.

[TMNTturtlguy]

@ruckage I pulled down the text you created for me and it works perfectly! Thank you so much. i just added that font to my theme and only used it in the gamelist so that it doesn't effect any other alignment and it looks great. Thanks again for all the help with this!

[ruckage]

@TMNTturtlguy
No problem, I'm happy to help. I'm glad it works.
Looks like @jdrassa has a fix too which is good news.

[jdrassa]

I just submitted the fix. Moral of the story is that fonts are weird.

[mattrixk]

@jdrassa I haven't really had the chance to follow the forum lately... do I need to do something to fix up MetaPixel, or have you fixed that?

[jdrassa]

@mattrixk I fixed it.

[RedBatman]

@jdrassa So where do we go to update? ES themes? Or somewhere else?

[pjft]

Update ES from source.

[RedBatman]

@pjft Thanks

[pjft]

@RedBatman Not a bother. Just remember to exit ES before updating, just in case :)