Pinned and Moving strings very small

[KatieWoe]

Test device:
Dell Laptop
Operating System:
Win 10
Browser:
chrome
Problem description:
For phetsims/qa#216
When stringTest=double, some of the strings become small rather quickly (custom attraction in particular) and Pinned and Moving seem to become quite tiny. This seems to be in part due to an apparent change in size and position of the toolbox between versions. These strings were smaller in the published version, but it seems more prominent now.
Steps to reproduce:

1. Set stringTest=double
2. Set stringTest=double on the published version
3. Compare

Screenshots:
The gif bellow shows the rc on the left tab, and the published version on the right

Troubleshooting information (do not edit):

Name: ‪Atomic Interactions‬:‪Atomic Interactions‬
URL: https://phet-dev.colorado.edu/html/atomic-interactions/1.1.0-rc.1/phet/atomic-interactions_en_phet.html?stringTest=double
Version: 1.1.0-rc.1 2018-11-05 21:18:48 UTC
Features missing: touch
Flags: pixelRatioScaling
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36
Language: en-US
Window: 1536x732
Pixel Ratio: 2.5/1
WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium)
GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium)
Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL)
Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 30 uniform: 4096
Texture: size: 16384 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 32)
Max viewport: 16384x16384
OES_texture_float: true
Dependencies JSON: {"assert":{"sha":"928741cf","branch":"HEAD"},"atomic-interactions":{"sha":"15bb3a2d","branch":"HEAD"},"axon":{"sha":"d7ba44e2","branch":"HEAD"},"brand":{"sha":"89d28f63","branch":"HEAD"},"chipper":{"sha":"bbbb514a","branch":"HEAD"},"dot":{"sha":"820111c8","branch":"HEAD"},"joist":{"sha":"749f10ff","branch":"HEAD"},"kite":{"sha":"59755f7e","branch":"HEAD"},"nitroglycerin":{"sha":"ccaab9cd","branch":"HEAD"},"phet-core":{"sha":"68a89cc4","branch":"HEAD"},"phet-io":{"sha":"364077cf","branch":"HEAD"},"phet-io-wrapper-classroom-activity":{"sha":"abc4ae3e","branch":"HEAD"},"phet-io-wrapper-hookes-law-energy":{"sha":"429886e7","branch":"HEAD"},"phet-io-wrapper-lab-book":{"sha":"ef0b0b0c","branch":"HEAD"},"phet-io-wrappers":{"sha":"7ec1a04a","branch":"HEAD"},"phetcommon":{"sha":"22b158d0","branch":"HEAD"},"query-string-machine":{"sha":"c2e502fb","branch":"HEAD"},"scenery":{"sha":"415371c3","branch":"HEAD"},"scenery-phet":{"sha":"94b92879","branch":"HEAD"},"sherpa":{"sha":"a9fd066b","branch":"HEAD"},"states-of-matter":{"sha":"d6317e0b","branch":"HEAD"},"sun":{"sha":"3086e97a","branch":"HEAD"},"tambo":{"sha":"0e5b9133","branch":"HEAD"},"tandem":{"sha":"a2348c0c","branch":"HEAD"}}

[arouinfar]

@jbphet looks like the panel in the rc is quite a bit narrower than the published version.

The maxWidth of Pinned, Moving, and Custom Attraction all seem a bit smaller than necessary

Similarly, the maxWidth of the strings in the Forces panel all look a bit small too. I think the maxWidth could extend to the magenta line.

[KatieWoe]

I've seen that on lower resolution screens (Chrome OS - Lovelace in this case) the small strings in the image above (van der Walls and electron overlap) are not legible. Since these max widths will likely be lengthened this may be less of a problem. What do you think @arouinfar?

[arouinfar]

@KatieWoe can you take a screenshot on Lovelace?

I won't make any recommendations until the maxWidth issue has been addressed.

[KatieWoe]

I've also noted that the arrows move to the left when the strings are short. Is that intended?

[arouinfar]

@KatieWoe good observation. I believe the position of the arrows is determined by the end of the longest string, so they will shift with varying string width/font size. So long as the alignment is maintained, I don't think that's an issue.

The issue here is that the maxWidths are just too small, and should be made as large as possible while maintaining some reasonable amount of padding.

[jbphet]

This sim is going on the back burner for a while due to other priorities. Unassigning, will reassign when work resumes.

[SaurabhTotey]

I have tried increasing the max widths in as many ways as I could. I still don't notice a huge difference after my changes, but I do think the differences in widths are a little noticeable. I will leave a status:ready-for-review label on this issue so that the current changes can be reviewed and I can be later instructed on what to do next.

[SaurabhTotey]

I went back through all the width variables that I changed in phetsims/states-of-matter@dd511c8 in a more thorough manner. After a more careful examination, I was able to find the variables that actually changed what I was looking to change. I then steepened those values so that the max widths of the relevant pieces of the panels are better. However, I think it still might be a good idea to widen and heighten the panels just a little bit.

[SaurabhTotey]

I have now made my final touches. I am unsure of what the end goal is for these panels, but I have tried increasing the max width for the text in these panels for atomic-interactions while not affecting states-of-matter too heavily. Assigning to @arouinfar to get feedback and/or further advice.

[SaurabhTotey]

Removing status:ready-for-review label as this issue is assigned to @arouinfar.

[arouinfar]

@SaurabhTotey the maxWidths are all looking good in master. I think it would be helpful to make the panel a bit wider still (and scale up the maxWidths accordingly). Let's try a 10% increase in panel width.

[SaurabhTotey]

In master the panel width has increased from 190 to 209. Here is what the change looks like.

Old:

New:

The change is slight, so I can widen the panels even more if necessary.

[arouinfar]

Thanks @SaurabhTotey, looks good!

[KatieWoe]

String lengths themselves look ok

[jbphet]

I ran into this when doing phet-io instrumentation of SOM, see phetsims/states-of-matter#266. The panels now seem to have an odd gap on the right side in both SOM and AI, and it doesn't look good to my eye. @SaurabhTotey - can you please revisit this and make the panels look more balanced? Even when I use the long string tests, this space is still present on the side.

Screenshots from the current master versions:

[SaurabhTotey]

Here is what the panels look like now in SOM and AI respectively.

Assigning to @arouinfar to determine what more should be done, if anything. @jbphet suggested that it might look nice to align the forces arrows with the atoms in the atoms panel.

[arouinfar]

This was addressed in the 1.2 release and it looks fine to me, closing.