Ardour provides a scale setting to allow users to change GUI scale.
However it also includes a past attempt to make Ardour adjust font sizes based on Linux system settings.
On Linux system I change my DE default font size to a slightly larger size. Because of this my Application Bar uses up more vertical screen height as well as shows strange tall rectangular button shapes.
My Mantis posts requests to remove this feature, but I do not see this being worked on any time soon/if at all. In the mean time, I was wondering if anyone else experienced this and by any chance has a solution?
This just occurs with a slight font size increase, I would imagine there has to be a Linux based user that uses an even bigger DE default font size that would experience this even more?
I know that GTK2 (which Ardour uses) offered ways of editing application GUI properties such as font sizes (similar to how GTK3 offers this with CSS), that would be added to launch commands.
Ardour is a little bit different of an application so I am not sure that it will support something like this?
Does anyone by any chance know of anything like this, that could be added to Ardour launch command?
What distro is this? Ardour goes to significant lengths to prevent any desktop environment settings from affecting how it is drawn. If that is happening, your distro has done something to circumvent our attempts to ignore this. We are never interested in DE settings.
@paul
Hey Paul, thank you for your response.
Let me run some more tests and I will get back to you, but did you follow link in my Mantis post link?
Which was a link to this page
In the past when this was discussed, Robin mentioned this was something that was attempted in the past?
Did you guys remove it since?
Or does this still exist?
I would guess that by the lack of response that it was realized that this does occur.
But another item that is not important to be worked on at this time.
Based on the response that this was some kind of issue based on the specific DE that I was using / just something with my machine,
I spent even more time on this issue to test other Linux DEs to verify if that statement was correct.
I was going to type a detailed post about my test results but these posts do not seem to be worth making so I will just share the following.
-All the GTK based DEs that I tested = This font size issues does occur
-The main Qt based DE known as KDE Plasma = This font issues does not occur (This DE offers ability to change many different font instances used, I set all the ones available to 16-18 font size and still did not experience this issue).
Robin explained in that 2 year old thread that we do indeed pay limited attention to the desktop font size, using it as a guide for how big our own font sizing should be, based on the idea that you’ve probably set the DE font size appropriately.
Thank you for response
I apologize but I am a little confused.
“based on the idea that you’ve probably set the DE font size appropriately?”
I am not expecting Ardour to have any connection with my DE font size.
The standard default font size that most DEs use is about 10 - 10.5
I increase my font size to 12
My exaggerated example of 16 is for anyone who tests this to really see what is happening.
So let’s say I open up two instances of Ardour
One with a DE font size of 10
and
One with a DE font size of 16
Both will show the exact same font size used within all the toolbar buttons, which is expected because Ardour uses its own font sizes.
However it is the size of the buttons themselves that is the issue.
-The Ardour with a DE font size of 10 shows normal buttons sizes
-The Ardour with a DE font size of 16 shows huge buttons as if Ardour is programmed to create buttons for that 16 font size, but as mentioned the font sizes themselves are the same size.
To me it seems that the button size changes should not be happening at all because there is no reason to increase the size of the buttons.
If this issues remains, then users have to use a DE font size of 10 to prevent this issue from occurring.
To me this seems strange because it does not make sense that Ardour would be using DE font size, when as you guys have mentioned, Ardour uses its own scaling to increase font sizes along with GUI elements such as buttons.
@x42
Do you by any chance have any information you can share about this topic?
If you get a nightly build or a self-build after commit adeebb8f00, and set GDK_NO_XSETTINGS in your enviroment, this issue will go away.
It turns out that GTK uses XSettings to get information from DE’s, but the way this information is used is incredibly complex. I’ve spent many hours doing a deep dive into this, and am not really a lot closer to understanding precisely how the size of a font that is never used ends up causing all the mis-sizing that you’ve observed.
Rather than spending a lot more time trying to figure that out, which I’d like to do but isn’t very useful to most people, I’ve added this Gordian-knot-cutting workaround. You may see differences in the font used, since Ardour will now completely ignore your DE settings.
@paul
Hey Paul
So in your initial response you did not perform the test I mentioned?
Thank you for taking the time to look into this.
I am still trying to figure out what to do with the GDK line mentioned so I cannot provide any test results yet.
Do you or anyone else know how to apply this setting? GDK_NO_XSETTINGS
Also while I am here,
You mention that you were not able to figure out how this could be officially fixed.
In that linked post that I made 2 years ago where we discussed this very issue, Robin had mentioned that he was the one who had added this in the past.
I tagged him in my reply post above but no response, but if you are unaware of the cause/fix of this, maybe Robin has more information on the topic since he was the one who originally attempted to implement this? If you wanted to discuss this with him in the future?
As mentioned this occurs in all the GTK based DEs I have tested such as Cinnamon, XFCE, etc.
So any users who change their systems default font size would experience this and probably not know / be aware of why their toolbar buttons appear so large in a main toolbar that is seen all the time in Ardour.
An environment variable can be set in a couple of different ways.
The fastest way to check would be to set the environment variable in a terminal, then start ardour from that terminal: GDK_NO_XSETTINGS=1; /usr/local/bin/Ardour9
That assumes you are running the ardour.org build. If you are running a build from your linux distribution the command will probably be something like /usr/bin/ardour9 to start Ardour.
If that solves the problem for you you can edit your .bash_profile file to always set that variable:
export GDK_NO_XSETTINGS=1
With that added to your .bash_profile then every time you open a terminal it will be set, so you just have to launch ardour. That assumes your distribution is relatively standard and uses bash for the terminal, or that you have not chosen to use a different shell. If you chose a different shell then presumably you can find the appropriate place to set your environment variables.
A third option is to edit the shortcut which launches Ardour. I’m not at a Linux machine where I can try this at the moment, but I am pretty confident that you would edit the line in the Ardour desktop file which is this by default:
@ccaudie
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of these different approaches, some I was aware of and some not.
Strange because I thought I had done this when I had tested, by putting the EV at the beginning of the command, similar to actions that I had done in the past for other applications regarding similar GTK_ based prefixed EVs.
I may have tried this in a launcher, which on my system certain things are not supported in fields, not sure.
But anyways, this command works now
Thanks again
@x42
Thank you Robin for pointing out this correction.
You both also pointed out some things about command locations that I had forgotten about.
I had been testing out the nightly builds so much that I got so focused on the commands that they provide on system.
So thank you guys for this as well.
Paul
Thank you again for taking the time to look into this issue.
