How to change font size?

[priyadarshan]

I just found out about tlcockpit, it is a wonderful tool, thank you!

I am using it on FreeBSD (RELEASE-11.1), on a large screen with 110 dpi, and font is quite tiny.

Is there a way to change font size?

Thanks again.

[norbusan]

I think this is a Java dependet thing and afair Java does by now not support arbitrary scaling based on dpi. Java9 should (?) improve this, though.

There is probably another way to specify a different font size. On BSD Iguess Java uses Gtk2 (by now, will switch to Gtk3 soon), and you could adjust the default font there?

[priyadarshan]

Thank you, I will look at Java documentation.

[maieul]

I think it could be useful to have a greater font size by default

[norbusan]

I'll look into configuration of the font size

[ekuester]

On hiDPI-displays (such as my MacbookPro Retina 13 inch with Fedora Linux) the program is quasi not usable. Window size and font size are only half as they should be, a pain for the eyes ... This is daily reality in the Java programs I am using but ... the other ones have remedies. So you can help yourself invoking the programs with special options (which here do not work!), for instance
jedit -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0
mucommander -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0
Alternatively you could give the possibility in preferences to choose the font size. Often it is enough to increase the size double high as normal (i.e. 24 instead of 12).
I would highly appreciate if there were such possibilties in this otherwise unblameable program.
In the meantime I must help myself with the old but working
tlmgr --font 'Helvetica 12' gui

[norbusan]

@ekuester which version of Java are you using? All the signs indicate that recent versions of java8 as well as java9 do support hidpi out of the box.

The other options you are mentioning are for Swing applications AFAIR, which doesn't help for ScalaFX/JavaFX.

[ekuester]

@norbusan nope, I tested it both with the latest Java jdk1.8.0_161 and jdk-9.0.4 and got the reported results. Ok, I do know little about ScalaFX/JavaFX. Maybe the Mac Retina display is a special candidate, I had issues with it using tvbrowser (TV program guide written in Java). But there I can choose in preferences theme GTK+ and tango icons and all went fine ...

[mojca]

It works just fine for me on 15" retina/10.13/JDK 10.

[norbusan]

Thanks @mojca for checking. As this is nothing I can influence easily (would need a rewrite in Swing which I don't like) I can only hope that this will be fixed at some point by newer JavaFX/ScalaFX libraries.

[ekuester]

@mojka which jdk10 are you using? Would it be sufficient to install the software from Oracle?

[mojca]

Yes, I installed it from Oracle. Running java brought up a window with a link.

[ekuester]

@mojca I assume you are under macOS, because there I have no problems even with Java jdk1.8 ...

Just to test it I installed jdk10 download from Oracle but under Linux ( Fedora 27 ). There is the same behavior as with the older versions :-(( so no success at all.

[mojca]

Yes, macOS. I only wrote "10.13" as a reference to retina display mentioned in a previous post.

[norbusan]

@ekuester Ahh, you are running Retina display with Linux. I read that the HiDPi support for Retina displays on Mac and Windows is working, but on Linux it is WIP, so I am not surprised that it doesn't work on Linux.

[ekuester]

@norbusan Yes, that is the point ... due to some disappointments with Apple I decided to use mostly Linux, which is actually so much better than one should believe ... On my triple-boot-system (macOS/Fedora/Windows10) I could use macOS, but I dont want, not to speak of Windows.

[norbusan]

@ekuester whom do you tell ;-) When I was still working at university I had a macpro with retina where I also mostly used Linux instead of MacOS, there I could test all this, but since then I was moved on now I have no chance.

[ekuester]

To my disappointment under Linux/Fedora 30 with openjdk version "11.0.4" 2019-07-16 the behaviour on hiDPI displays has not changed (just tested with Dell XPS 13 9380 UHD).

[norbusan]

Hi @ekuester
hmm, no idea. Can you try -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0 added to the java incantation? And or exporting export GDK_SCALE=2 in the shell before starting tlcockpit? Does any of these help?

Thanks

[norbusan]

Addon, it seems to be fixed in OpenJDK9: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8137050 so I am surprised.

[ekuester]

Hi @norbusan,
the -Dsun option does not help (maybe it is only for Oracle Java), but the second advice works on command line:
$ GDK_SCALE=2 tlcockpit
GDK_SCALE=3 is perfect for my dell ... so I added export GDK_SCALE=3 before the last line of the tlcockpit.sh script and am very satisfied.

[norbusan]

Great, thanks for the feedback. I have added a paragraph to the readme to clarify HiDPI usage. I guess newer versions will get better support over time.

Closing this bug for now.

Thanks