Display scalling problem with Clementine

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

Clementine 1.4 rc2

I'm on Xubuntu.  I just upgraded from 20.02 to 22.02.1 and it was a miserable experience with many things breaking.  I'm getting back to normal now and Clementine is operating fine, but it is now scaling fonts much too big and I cannot determine why.  It is the only app exhibiting this behavior.  I have two 4K screens (3840x2160).  In Settings->Display, the monitor Scale factor is set to 1x just as it was previously and everything other than Clementine displays as it always has.  The Clementine window itself seems OK with labels appearing correct, but the fonts in the tabs, sidebar and playlist windows are much too large.  I'm not positive if the fonts used in the Preferences and Pull-down menus are bigger than before since I have nothing to compare them to at this point, but I think they are also too big.  I don't see any place to adjust the font.

Any idea what may have happened and how I can get this back to a normal size?

Thanks.

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

I recompiled clementine from source and the fonts still remain too large, so I'm still looking for any pointers as to what happened in Xubuntu that is responsible for this strange behavior.

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

I thought a screenshot would help to explain the problem.  Here is a link:

http://cjsa.com/misc/clementine_01.jpg

Everything is magnified, including the star ratings.

I looked in ~/.config/Clementine/Clementine.conf for any clues as to fonts that could be adjusted.  I found:

[OSDPretty]

font="Verdana,9,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0"

[SongInfo]

font_size=8.5

I stopped Clementine, changed the font_size to 5.5 and changed the Verdana  value of 9 to 5, and then restarted it with no effect.  Any idea why changing these values has no effect?  Is there something else that can be tweaked?

As far as I know, I'm still running the same binary in /usr/bin/clementine as I was before upgrading to Xubuntu 22.04.

The current deb package is 1.4.0~rc1+git347-gfc4cb6fc7+dfsg-2

If anyone is still on Ubuntu 20.04, could they please check to see if this is the same, or if an earlier build was installed.  Since this is the only application displaying this font scaling problem, I'm still focusing on the problem being with Clementine rather than elsewhere.  If we could pin things down between builds, that would be useful.

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

I just tried out the VLC player under Xubuntu 22.04 and I'm seeing the same oversized font scaling problem that I observe in Clementine.  I checked and VLC is also using the Qt library as opposed to GTK that most other apps use, so I'm now thinking that it is this library acting up.  Qt 5.15.3 seems to be the libraries installed  here.  I've never used Qt so I'm blind at this point, but does this provide a clue that might lead to a fix or a workaround?  Does the user have the ability to set some config options for Qt that might reign these tools back into a more usable state?  Thanks for any pointers.

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

I reported this to the Qt team and they said "This doesn't seem like a bug in Qt."  :-(

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

Just to make the issue clearer, here is a comparison of headers from various programs

showing how clementine and vlc are display fonts as compared to all others.

http://cjsa.com/misc/headers_01.jpg

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

Well, it doesn't look like there is anyone familiar with the nature of the problem.  In my research

I was led to the program qt5ct which allows various global Qt library parameters to be changed.

I was able to use it to adjust the fonts smaller as can be seen in this image:

http://cjsa.com/misc/clementine_02.jpg

This is better, but now the icons (torso on the left and rating stars on the right) are determining

the line height which is placing too much space between the entries.  So now I'm wondering

how these can be reduced.  The rating stars in particular are far too large.  A quick scan of the

source code shows various icons in the data/icons directory, but neither of these exist there.

So, any suggestions  are appreciated.

[jeffer...@gmail.com]

A while ago I reported on a new GUI scaling problem with Qt apps, including Clementine.  I just had another app, OpenShot, update and start exhibiting the same problem.  More research led me to some QT variables that proved to be useful.  In the case of Clementine, by exporting the QT_SCALE_FACTOR=0.9 before launching clementine, I was able to get the display back into some reasonable state.  Others with different screen resolutions might play around with the scaling factor to see what works best.  Regards.