Retina display support extended

We’ve been making a series of user interface enhancements to fully support “Retina Displays”, such as those found on the new Apple Macs, and for those of you using 4k or 5k PC monitors.

Please let us know if any of these tweaks adversely affect the readability of your own Protopage, so that we can make any necessary fixes promptly.

Update: We’ve just added a new option to the Colors/Settings menu in Protopage. It’s called “Squeeze lines of text closer together”, and if you tick that checkbox you can now fit more headlines and bookmarks into your widgets.

The issues you may encounter are:

1. The new font we use is very slightly larger than the old font. Therefore, you may prefer to go to the Colors/Settings menu in Protopage to reduce the font size. Alternatively, on modern web browsers you can press Ctrl+ or Ctrl- (Cmd+ or Cmd- on Mac) to change your font size. We’ve also got a new feature in the Protopage Colors/Settings menu called “Squeeze lines of text closer together”.

2. If you use free widget positioning, the new font means your widgets may be slightly taller. Therefore all you need to do is nudge some of the widgets downward on your page so they are not too close together.

3. If you are using the Internet Explorer web browser, you may be using 5-10 year old web browser technology that struggles to display fonts as well as newer versions. Please upgrade to the latest Internet Explorer version for better performance and font display (search for “Upgrade to Internet Explorer 11” on Google). Alternatively, if you would consider switching to a different web browser, the best option that we would highly recommend is that you switch from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome (download from www.google.com/chrome).

We know that some of you are using corporate computers and are not allowed or able to upgrade to a modern web browser, and so we are still doing our best to ensure Protopage is as compatible as possible.

If you are using Microsoft Windows, it can make a dramatic improvement in font clarity if you enable “Microsoft ClearType”. For more information, depending on what version of Windows you are using, Google for e.g. “Windows 7 enable cleartype”.

18 Responses to “Retina display support extended”

  1. Bob ONeill Says:

    Hi. The font size of all the modules has gotten bigger and all the modules and text overlap other modules. The page now looks ugly and cluttered. I’ve loaded my page in Firefox and Chrome and it is the same everywhere. Can this be fixed? This has to be fixed. Thanks!

  2. Protopage Team Says:

    Hi Bob, please could you contact us at https://www.protopage.com/_api/contact and send us a screenshot? Thanks

  3. Jonathon Fish Says:

    Same problem as Bob… text size is increased (although it’s set to “11” – the smallest size in Settings), modules overlap, and my page looks awful.

  4. Protopage Team Says:

    Jonathon – are you using free positioning mode or 3/4/5 column mode?

  5. Jonathon Fish Says:

    Free positioning is selected for my Home page.

  6. Jonathon Fish Says:

    Are you going to be rolling this back anytime soon, so we can use our start pages? It has made my start page completely unusable, with the overlapping modules, the scrolling, etc. If not soon, please let me know so I can make other arrangements. (This is broken on my iPad 3rd Gen. as well… so that’s Windows 8.1, Windows 10, iOS 9… Safari, IE, Edge, Chrome and Firefox. How did you do any testing and not pick up on this problem?)

  7. James Vandernaald Says:

    I’m using a retina iMac27, and in the last few days my Protopage font has changed to a different font and much larger. Very bad. I hope you can roll this back to what it was, and do some testing before releasing it. I think this is serious, and I hope you will agree and take action soon. Thanks.

  8. Jake Says:

    I’m loving the new font and retina support. It looks WAY better on my Retina MacBook Pro. Please don’t roll it back!

  9. Richard Says:

    I am sorry but the new font is so much worse than before on my PC. I do not have perfect vision and now find it really awkward to read. Please give us the ability to change it back to the original one.

  10. Dave Rowe Says:

    Hi – my text size has also increased even thought font settings = 10; some widgets also feature larger text sizes (e.g. Stickey Note and Weather)
    Also now widget backgrounds colours are all white ??? can’t seem to amend these colours in “Colors and Settings”??

    Is there a Reset and start from Scratch button/option?

    dr

  11. Georges V. Says:

    On Firefox running under 1080p the fonts & widget frames/corners look way better!

    thank you.

  12. Protopage Team Says:

    Please everyone write in at https://www.protopage.com/_api/contact because then we can better understand which particular web browser version you are using and what specifically is going wrong with your page.

    In particular, we’re a bit confused about the reports over “overlapping widgets”, because widgets can be dragged and dropped and resized. There should therefore be no issue with anyone being stuck with overlapping widgets, unless we’re not understanding the issue properly.

    James Vandernaald – please note that in addition to the font size selection in the Colors/Settings menu, all modern browsers allow you to press Cmd/Ctrl +/- on the keyboard to change the font size. Does this solve the problem for you?

    We recommend everyone try upgrading their browser to Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari if they can. Older versions of Internet Explorer from the early and mid 2000s can give poor page load performance and font rendering, and so the upgrade is very highly desirable.

  13. Protopage Team Says:

    Update: We’ve just added a new option to the Colors/Settings menu in Protopage. It’s called “Squeeze lines of text closer together”, and if you tick that checkbox you can now fit more headlines and bookmarks into your widgets.

  14. kunst Says:

    The squeeze lines doesn’t work. And i still want to use IE
    Why not make a option were you can adjust the font size than the problems must be solved

  15. Steve Says:

    Anyone else notice if you resize an RSS feed or group of feeds with everything read until there isn’t a scroll bar showing that after reading the next new post the widget resizes it self (bigger) and you end up with a blank white space at the foot of the widget.

    It has only started doing this since the font change.

  16. John Says:

    I now see a box with a square symbol instead of numbers and correct symbols in my protopage. I use Chrome and recently switched to Windows 10. I don’t see this on any page except protopage.

  17. Protopage Team Says:

    We’re still cleaning up a few outstanding bugs related to the font size change, including making sure feed widgets don’t always auto resize. These changes will go live in the next few days.

    John, please use our contact form https://www.protopage.com/_api/contact to send us a message, and then we can help you send us a screenshot so that we can understand the specific issue you’re having.

  18. Jay Says:

    Image feeds all show each image at full size rather than resizing in the previous version. Also RSS feeds are loading noticeably slower on the new version. Tried multiple computers and browsers definitely slower.