linux : UI and fonts really large on a 4k display

[TTimo]

The UI and the fonts are very large when running on a 4k display. Is it possible to make it smaller? I haven't found working settings in preferences. See video:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxe95ggbjx23hkc/File%20Nov%2027%2C%2009%2023%2025.mov?dl=0

[egraether]

We have some issues with highDPI screens on Linux (also #518). I did some research and found possible solutions (source).

Please try fixing this by setting the environment variable QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR before running Sourcetrail:

export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1

If that doesn't work please try to set QT_SCALE_FACTOR:

export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2

Please let me know if that changed anything and how.

[egraether]

Found more info on ArchLinux Wiki. The info in the Note box might be related to your case:

Note:

• If you manually set the screen factor, it is important to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 otherwise some applications which explicitly force high DPI enabling get scaled twice.
• QT_SCALE_FACTOR scales fonts, but QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS does not scale fonts.
• If you also set the font DPI manually in xrdb to support other toolkits, QT_SCALE_FACTORS will give you huge fonts.

[TTimo]

Thanks. Observations so far:

Text appears in three contexts: menus (Project/Edit/View etc.), dialogs (such as the preferences and project loading dialog) and project windows (Code, Status, Search).

• If I set the Font Size to 6 in the preferences dialog, then the font sizes in the project windows are the right size. That corresponds to setting Font Size to 12 on a smaller screen basically.

The menus are normal sized as well, but the dialogs are blown up twice as big as they should be. Overall that's the best setup and it's usable.

• QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR does nothing (tried 1, 2, 0.5 values)

• QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 blows everything up bigger.

• QT_SCALE_FACTOR=0.5 makes the dialogs the right size, but menus and project windows all shrink. I can fix the project windows by bringing back the font size to 12, but the menus remain illegibly small so that's not an option.

Hope this helps!

[egraether]

Thank you for giving it a try!

I think I will need to provide you a build with more log information and command line options to get to the bottom of this.

[sasq64]

Same issue here, but note that these errors are reported for me (on a fresh Ubuntu 17.10):

Fontconfig error: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf", line 72: non-double matrix element
Fontconfig error: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf", line 72: non-double matrix element
Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf", line 80: saw unknown, expected number

[egraether]

@TTimo Did you also try setting QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR = 0 as commented here in #518?

[egraether]

@TTimo I added settings for defining the flags QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR and QT_SCALE_FACTOR within the Preferences UI in our new release. Please download the new beta and give it a try:

Turning off Auto Scaling to DPI might fix your issue. Please let me know if that works. It is turned on by default, because this seems to be the right thing for most systems.

[TTimo]

I have both auto scaling and scale factor set to 'system' in latest release, and don't have problems anymore. Thank you!