HiDPI scaling, fonts too small to read
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deerewright
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Fri Oct 13, 2017 6:05 am
HiDPI scaling, fonts too small to read
I am running UMS 6.7.4 on Ubuntu 16.04 with Oracle Java 8. I have this issue with other Java apps as well, but UMS seems to be the worst, so far.
The fonts on UMS are so tiny, I am barely able to read them:
My display settings are 3200x1800 and "Scale for menu and title bars" is set to 2.
I saw over at github they had a solution for Retina displays (Mac), is there something similar that can be done here for UMS?
The fonts on UMS are so tiny, I am barely able to read them:
- Screenshot from 2017-10-12 13-15-50.png (349.36 KiB) Viewed 8560 times
- Screenshot from 2017-10-12 13-22-02.png (114.78 KiB) Viewed 8560 times
Re: HiDPI scaling, fonts too small to read
There's no need to post both here and in the issue tracker. I don't think there's anything we can do about this, the fundamental problem is that there's no standard for handling "non standard" DPI monitors. Apple has made "a kind of" support in their OS, but it's not very general (images have to be provided in 2x resolution, which means it will only really work properly when the DPI is exactly double that of "standard") and has a lot of quirks. As far as I know UMS works reasonably well under these conditions though (I don't have a high-DPI monitor so I can't really tell).
When it comes to Linux I think it's a very long way before there's even a hope that nonstandard DPI will work properly. The problem is the lack of standards under Linux. For software like Java to implement something like this, there must be a standard to implement. The developers of Java aren't willing to maintain specific code for each graphics manager/desktop and their different versions. It's easy to see how that would be a nightmare. The result is that scaling (and many other things) simply aren't supported.
The closest thing to a standardization of Linux desktops are freedeskop.org as far as I know. I don't know how directly related this thread is, but as you can see these things aren't even resolved at this level yet: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93315
Once things are standardized, expect there to go some years until it is properly implemented in the ecosystem in things like Java. I'm afraid there's very little (that I know of) that we can do about this without making things huge so that it would be useless on all standard DPI monitors. That is obviously not an option.
When it comes to Linux I think it's a very long way before there's even a hope that nonstandard DPI will work properly. The problem is the lack of standards under Linux. For software like Java to implement something like this, there must be a standard to implement. The developers of Java aren't willing to maintain specific code for each graphics manager/desktop and their different versions. It's easy to see how that would be a nightmare. The result is that scaling (and many other things) simply aren't supported.
The closest thing to a standardization of Linux desktops are freedeskop.org as far as I know. I don't know how directly related this thread is, but as you can see these things aren't even resolved at this level yet: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93315
Once things are standardized, expect there to go some years until it is properly implemented in the ecosystem in things like Java. I'm afraid there's very little (that I know of) that we can do about this without making things huge so that it would be useless on all standard DPI monitors. That is obviously not an option.
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deerewright
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Fri Oct 13, 2017 6:05 am
Re: HiDPI scaling, fonts too small to read
IMHO, just another reason to avoid Java altogether...Once things are standardized, expect there to go some years until it is properly implemented in the ecosystem in things like Java. I'm afraid there's very little (that I know of) that we can do about this without making things huge so that it would be useless on all standard DPI monitors. That is obviously not an option.
Re: HiDPI scaling, fonts too small to read
It's up to you where you want to put the blame, but I think the Linux desktops is to blame for the lack of standards. Java has some disadvantages, but if UMS wasn't Java I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be available for Linux at all.
Re: HiDPI scaling, fonts too small to read
@deerewright Could the use of Java 7 instead, as it doesn't have this weak HiDPI support at all, solve your displaying issue ?
That was my 2 cents.
That was my 2 cents.
