#183 Hard to use on high-dpi screen

[Jim]

I have recently started using some high-resolution screens, and there are a couple of problems using xournal there.
(1) the icons in the toolbars are a bit small (minor problem), and
(2) the dot drawn to show the pencil tip is so small that it is very hard to use
(this is almost a show-stopper).

I have played around with all the settings I can find, and I can't convince xournal to make
any of these bigger. Can this be done?

(Sorry if thie is a "support request" or "feature request" as opposed to a bug.)

[Jim]

Also forgot to mention: I'm using Slackware64 14.2

[Denis Auroux]

(1) Regarding icons: there is no clean solution, but there is a hack. Find the image files for xournal's icons, likely in /usr/share/xournal/pixmaps/ or /usr/local/share/xournal/pixmaps/ and use your favorite graphics converter to make them larger. For example, assuming you have ImageMagick's "convert" tool installed:

for i in *.png
do
   mv $i $i.old.png
   convert $i.old.png -resize 200% $i
 done

(you can undo by renaming the .old.png files to overwrite the rescaled ones, or by reinstalling the package). Only some of the icons get properly rescaled so it will look ugly but it should be more useable.

(2) regarding the pencil tip dot: have you tried Options -> Pencil cursor ? Not ideal since that cursor is always black instead of changing colors with the selected pen, but it should be more visible. Or, if you're willing to recompile from source code, edit src/xo-paint.c and change the defined value of PEN_CURSOR_RADUS (on or near line 51) to a larger value, and similarly for HILITER_CURSOR_RADIUS and HILITER_BORDER_RADIUS (perhaps change them from 1,3,4 to 4,6,7). I'm afraid 7 is the largest legal value currently.

If all goes well, in a few weeks I'll have a new laptop with a high-dpi screen and will probably feel motivated to work on it. But in the meantime, hopefully these two suggestions can help make everyday life less miserable.

Denis

[Jim]

Thanks for that information. As your mention, only some of the icons are increased in size (and I appreciate the ones that get big). Some of the other gtk programs I use seem to understand that they should use bigger icons on this system. Is that something that could "easily" be "turned on" in xournal for the "generic" options?

I didn't try the "Options/Pencil cursor" until you mentioned it. As you say, it is very visible, but there is a considerable offset between where the tip of that pencil is and where the writing occurs. I guess I could train myself to compensate, but I like the next suggestion a lot more.

No problem to recompile from source. And 4 is plenty. I could probably be happy with 3. The HILITER ones were OK without the increase, but they are also OK with the increase.

Those suggestions were great. Thanks for the (very fast) help.

[Joshua Freedman]

This is still a problem. I don't think highdpi displays should be a big surprise anymore. I'm running Ubuntu Bionic on a yoga 920. 14-inch, 3840 x 2160, touch screen 14-inch, 1920 x 1080, touch screen

[Denis Auroux]

I am aware of this. Haven't found a great way to deal with it. GTK2
doesn't seem to have received much Hi-DPI attention, and porting xournal
to GTK3 comes with issues (and lack of time on my part; though there is
an experimental port by Daniel German on his github).

In the meantime, I continue to suggest that Options -> Pencil Cursor is
your friend (the resulting pencil cursor is HiDPI aware in Gnome 3 at
least: changing the display factor to 200% in the gnome display settings
will make the pencil cursor twice as large); and the dirty hack I gave
in a previous comment for rescaling many of the icon bitmaps for the
toolbar.

Denis