In the last year I often had to held live presentations of Eclipse development. At that point a typical problem is, that the font sizes used during development are too small for the projector.
The possible solutions are either ignoring this fact, using a special environment, where all the appropriate settings have been made, or tweaking the development environment. The tweaking will not work, as several settings should be made, and they are easy to forget, while the special presentation environment seems too much of a hassle for me. This left as the only choice to ignore the fact.
But finally I had some hacking time, so I created a Presentation theme for Eclipse, that solves tweaking by a single selection of the user interface: Themes can be selected in the General/Appearance tab on the Preferences page.
Currently, the theme description is a bit hacky: for every platform the default font is copied by hand to the plugin.xml (using a Windows 7, a OpenSuse 11.3 Linux and a Snow Leopard machine). More research is needed to solve this in a more generic way. Luckily only four fonts have been redefined by the theme.
Some things missing: support for resizing elements in JFace viewers (such as EMF tree editors or CNF views), and the theme was not tested with graphical editors – although they can be resized using the Zoom control.
Finally, an early alpha version can be downloaded from our update site: http://eclipse.cubussapiens.hu
I’m looking for some feedback, or either alternative implementation ideas; I think, others have already met these problems.
The source is available from GitHub.
Update: before/after screenshots below.
