We’re carrying out some testing before upgrading a customer from 7.9 to 8.1. It is looking fairly smooth so far, but we have noticed 2 issues:
- We are using the Dialog font throughout and have noticed that the font used in 8.1 is wider than that used in 7.9. This mean that a lot of labels are being truncated and will have to be widened (if there is space)
- The font on a number of controls (particularly buttons) is very blocky and there doesn’t seem to be an antialias property any more
Any thoughts on resolving these issues? We’ve noticed them on both Linux and Windows clients.
Much like the other differences in the Look and Feel, I don’t think there’s anything to do about the font spacing change but tweak your screens as needed. Dialog is a logical font name that now maps to the Noto Sans font we ship with the runtime on all platforms.
Can you get a screenshot of the blocky fonts you’re seeing, one for Windows and one for Linux if you can? I’m curious what they look like for you. It may help to launch with an option like -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on and see if anything changes.
Where do I use that option Kevin?
Have a read of this. I’ve listed the things I’ve found not-quite-documented when migrating to 8 
In the client launcher if you click the little three dot icon and go to “Manage” I think there should be a field for additional JVM arguments.
Nick’s thread about undocumented changes is a supplement of sorts to this guide released with 8.0: https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC81/Ignition+8+Upgrade+Guide
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I might add that link to my post actually; I probably should have when I posted it. I just assumed people knew about it
Your post looks useful Nick, thanks.
That’s made a big difference Kevin.
Before:
After:
Is that on Linux or Windows?
For Linux I’m not surprised, but I hadn’t really heard anybody mention this re: Windows.
Both, although Windows is running inside a KVM virtual machine…
I’ve just tried running it in Windows 10 running directly on the hardware - it looks fine without having to add the Java option. (The previous test in the VM was on Windows 7.)
I’ve now put the same option into my Designer Launcher and the Designer looks much better as well 
I was told about the font sizing issue after performing an upgrade onsite on a Windows system. I adjusted the font size in a handful of Vision objects as needed. Most were still legible, but dropdowns were nearly unusable. I increased the row height and decreased font size to fix it. The Designer option mentioned above is likely better. If we had a test server we could have spotted it sooner.