Hello everyone, in Plasma 6 they removed the resolution adjustment by changing the DPI of the fonts. I have a 13.3-inch laptop and adjusting the screen resolution settings creates a tent circus. Large icons, small font, everything is crooked. No matter how I set it up, the font size and then the screen resolution are useless, it looks disgusting. Only setting DPI 120 allows you to see the ideal size in all (or almost all) programs and the system itself. Support those who have similar things going on, adjust the DPI of the fonts to get it back
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can you provide some screenshots?
There were screenshots here
It may seem that the type almost looks the same, but if you click one and another picture at once, for example, the main table, then it is very visible. The lower labels in the panel at screen resolution 120 cannot be adjusted at all; they are either too small or immediately large. At the same time, all fonts become very blurry (anti-aliasing is turned on), so that the eyes simply bleed.
Also, when adjusting fonts in programs and applications, they are also either too small or too large
Well, all look ok to me, but me is not you in any case 
Well, you know better), perhaps I’ll buy a new laptop with a 16-inch screen for the stable version of Plasma 6, but for now 5.27 behaves just fine).
I’m sure I don’t know better. It’s all subjective imho. Anyway…
I have a 14-inch 1920x1080 laptop，used to set “Force fonts DPI” to 144 and display scale 100%.
Now I have the same problem as you.
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I understand, but the creators don’t want to understand that one is not equal to the other (DPI 120 is not equal to screen resolution 120). Therefore, I propose to vote on a large scale for the return of this opportunity. We are users after all, and without users any product dies)
Has anything happened in this matter? I used to have the font DPI adjusted so text and documents would have the actual size like they would have on paper and I really miss that feature. I don’t need to have everything scaled on a global level. I just want my writer document on screen to have the same size it has on paper. This is so convenient, why isn’t this more of a thing?
If at least anyone could explain how to set this by myself without the official option in system settings, I would be very grateful.
Hi, I set the screen resolution to 125%, and changed the font (I picked it up until I saw that it looks good in applications), it became well, straight good. Try
I also used KDE - ArchWiki and my icons on the panel finally became normal Plasma style broken (?) after upgrade to 6 - KDE Plasma - Manjaro Linux Forum
I raised a similar issue, but then found my own solution which involves setting QT_FONT_DPI.
[Edited to add some background info…]
Note that scaling a display isn’t to be done without some thought. As illustrated in the thread I raised, until all KDE and non-KDE applications are updated to properly handling scaling, some behave counter intuitively - the most prominent example being applications involved with image or photo processing.
Why don’t you want everything scaled? I genuinely don’t understand this. Can you help me understand the motivation here?
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I can only comment on why I don’t want everything scaled - or rather why I want to leave my display scaled to 1.0 and have my fonts rendered at the hardware DPI of the physical display.
I want to use a variety of photographic tools and not all are scaling aware (I did post an example screen grab in another thread). I also want browsers and any other tools to show the image at true 100% so they can be compared with the same image in these photographic tools.
If I set the scale to 1.0 this works fine, except for font sizes which is addressed by setting the font DPI to 162 to match the true DPI of the display. That’s how I work in X11. In wayland I’ve done the same thing, but not having the DPI setting, as described in the other thread, I have to manually set this up:
% cat /home/tumb1/.config/plasma-workspace/env/hidpi.sh
export QT_FONT_DPI=162
(Except that window title-bars don’t see to obey QT_FONT_DPI and have to be set separately).
It was suggested that one day all photographic tools will fall into line, and all will show images unscaled. I don’t think that will be true for non-photographic tools, such as browsers. I also don’t consider waiting to be an acceptable strategy. It could take years, and old tools may never be fixed. It’s probably true that some tools will continue to run under Xwayland while others have moved onto Wayland. Staying scaled to 1.0 will hopefully avoid any potential issues with that mix.
I lack any deep understanding of the reason for taking away easy access to this choice. I think I read that setting the DPI might make some corner cases look wonky. I’m not seeing that with any of the tools I use. I don’t much care about the resulting aesthetics, just the usability.
Rather than moaning on too much, I should say thanks to all those who put effort into getting KDE to where it is today. It’s a remarkable effort, its usability and customizability are unparalleled.
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So your use case is basically using old tools that don’t do the right thing on Wayland, and it’s not so much that you actively want to scale only the fonts, it’s just that doing it this way was the only way you found to do the thing you actually did want to do.
On Wayland you should still use the supported scaling system, with a scale factor that’s equal to your system’s physical DPI divided by 96. This will scale everything (including fonts) to exactly the same size that it would have been scaled to, and be the right size on screen for printing.
Then, for your XWayland-using photographic apps, you’d have three options:
- In System settings > Display & monitor, set “Legacy applications (X11)” to “Scaled by the system” to make them use the exact same scaling as everything else.
- Don’t change that setting from its default value and run relevant XWayland-using apps with
QT_FONT_DPI=[whatever]in their environments. - Wait until all those apps become Wayland-native.
If you don’t like options, there’s a final one: keep using the X11 session for the time being, and continue to use the workaround you found.
I lack any deep understanding of the reason for taking away easy access to this choice.
I don’t much care about the resulting aesthetics
That would be why you don’t understand. Unfortunately as Plasma developers we have a responsibility to care about both, and about people who care about both. Ultimately we want to have everything work properly out of the box for everyone, rather than than offering a toolkit that experts can use to cobble together something fragile that kinda-sorta works for their specific use cases.
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Well I guess I don’t want any images scaled no matter what - I want one image pixel to be one display pixel for all applications old and new. But then the fonts are too small.
That’s sounds quite complicated. Wouldn’t it mean images would then not display 1 image-pixel per display-pixel? I guess that better states my real objective.
QT_FONT_DPI is a workaround for Wayland, not X11. I don’t need a workaround for X11 because it still has the Settings->Text & Fonts->Fonts->Force font DPI. I’m experimentally using QT_FONT_DPI in wayland, it appears to achieve what I have in X11.
(For now I will stick with X11, I’m waiting for wayland to be able to restore window positions. But I’ll continue to try Wayland from time to time).
You may be moving away from the reputation of KDE as being the most malleable of desktops. Closing off customizability means you have to correctly anticipate all/most needs or narrow your focus to users you are willing to support. But I can see that it could greatly reduce the backwards compatibility minefield, which is quite important given the limited resources available.
As long as you don’t add code to deliberately prevent such unsupported customisations, I’m happy to continue and live-with/workaround any accidental discontinuances.
We aren’t intentionally moving away from being customizable, but we are making an effort to reduce and condense overlapping and redundant settings: it’s better to have one setting that works well than 4 settings that are each flawed in different ways. But inevitably whenever we do this, there’s an understandable hue and cry from the people who found one of those four settings and had carefully tweaked things to be perfect for themselves.
As maintainers of the whole platform, unfortunately sometimes we need to put the needs of the many over these few. No, we aren’t intentionally locking out the ability to do personal workarounds, but we would prefer if you understand that they are workarounds that could break at any time.
And most importantly, we would really like it if, whenever you reach for a workaround, you submit a bug report carefully explaining why none of the built-in features or options do what you want, or what bugs are preventing you from using them. This way hopefully we can improve whatever’s working poorly enough that you go looking for a workaround for it.
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Understood, on both counts. No worries.
I’m going to add a few more comments below, because I think this might be touching on a useability issue that might be of more general interest.
Apologies in advance for dragging this out even longer.
Out of curiosity I had a play with the suggested workaround where I only set QT_FONT_DPI for Xwayland. That does result in programs such as oodraw rendering one pixel per physical pixel and an A4 document is actually 300mm high as a result. It’s not immediately obvious if a image app is running under Wayland or XWayland. (Side note: I’m not sure how to achieve this at Xwayland startup, I guess I could wrap Xwayland with a script, for testing I just launched applications from bash inside an xterm).
I’m still confused at what scaling on the Wayland side is achieving. If I scale to a value other than 1.0 am I getting to one physical pixel per image pixel? I think some Wayland/KDE image-editors opt out of scaling for images, but maybe not all.
I guess I would like a simple setting that for both Wayland and XWayland that uses the native DPI of the (primary?) display to configure the desktop so that one desktop pixel is equal to one physical pixel for all applications. There being two principle reasons, firstly so that photos rendered and viewed at 100% are viewed as they were captured by the camera, secondly so that a document previews at 100% are shown as they would measure on paper. The setting should be such that all applications, browsers, viewers, and image-editors in Wayland and XWayland cannot escape obeying the setting and are all in agreement on the view at 100% (or any scale actually).
Is this the kind of suggestion worth raising a bug over? Happy to do so if it helps.
It’s largely for making sure that objects on-screen all default to a known target size. See this old Phabricator Task about it. This is a slightly different use case from what’s needed for professional print use, but related. My sense is that as Wayland becomes more widespread, additional capabilities are getting bolted on as needed.
Originally it didn’t even have fractional scale at all, there was just 100%, 200%, 300%, etc. Now we have fractional scale which lets us use scaling to reach a “scaled target DPI”. For example on a 145 DPI screen, we can scale it by 150% to make things on screen almost exactly the same size as on a 96 DPI screen, which is the reference DPI.
This works fine for most apps. But for apps like image editors, it is beneficial to have the image view itself unscaled. As you’ve observed, Gwenview does this right. It’s up to apps to determine which parts of their user interface ought to be scaled per the standard scaling system and which parts oughtn’t.