Some apps have ridiculously big font size in X11

Help
1

Hello,

To avoid the flickering i have with wayland, i started a X11 session. Now it works fine, but there’s an exception: the texts in some apps are ridiculously big, and reducing the size in the OS parameters does nothing.

Copie d'écran_20240401_012204
Copie d'écran_20240401_0122042050×1166 262 KB

Copie d'écran_20240401_012345
Copie d'écran_20240401_0123452050×1166 138 KB

2

This seems like an issue with GTK apps only (from your screenshots)? Can you verify that this is not an issue with KDE apps? How about Firefox?

If this is indeed a general GTK configuration problem, then you should check your gtkrc files - can you post there the contents of:

  • ~/.gtkrc-2.0
  • ~/.config/gtkrc
  • ~/.config/gtkrc-2.0

Unfortunately, GNOME devs do not believe in a centralized way to manage system fonts - even though the GTK toolkit does that - and there’s no GTK-specific control panel that you can use to change global font settings. If the KDE System Settings Fonts module can’t fix it, then I believe something is broken in the GTK configuration files.

3

AFAIK, the apps mentioned above are currently the only ones to have this problem (strangely, it happens with Clementine audio player, but not with its fork), and i don’t see anything anormal in the config files.

  • ~/.config/gtkrc
# créé par KDE Plasma, Mon Apr 1 10:30:37 2024
#
include "/usr/share/themes/Breeze/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

gtk-theme-name="Breeze"
  • ~/.config/gtkrc-2.0
# créé par KDE Plasma, Mon Apr 1 10:30:37 2024
#

gtk-alternative-button-order = 1
  • ~/gtkrc-2.0
gtk-enable-animations=1
gtk-theme-name="Breeze"
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=1
gtk-toolbar-style=3
gtk-menu-images=1
gtk-button-images=1
gtk-cursor-theme-size=24
gtk-cursor-theme-name="breeze_cursors"
gtk-sound-theme-name="ocean"
gtk-icon-theme-name="breeze"
gtk-font-name="Noto Sans,  10"
4

EDIT: i spotted the problem into some other apps: Elisa, VLC, SMplayer, mpv, keepassXC and Ultimate Media Downloader.

It’s not linked to gtk, i tested many gtk apps that don’t have this problem.

5

The fact that the icons are all tiny in those screenshots indicates a deeper misconfiguration. Does the issue reproduce in a new clean user account? If not, then the issue is caused by something you previously did to try to change sizing or scaling in your normal user account.