Extremely small text in "MuseScore Connect" on high resolution laptop

• Nov 8, 2013 - 03:42

I have a Yoga 2 laptop with a resolution of 3200 x 1800 running the 64 bit version of MuseScore 1.3 on Windows 8.1. The text on MuseScore Connect is tiny and essentially unreadable on my 13.3 inch screen.

Windows 8.1 scales up most of the text and icons. But the scaling doesn't seem to affect the MuseScore Connect bar.

I've attached a screenshot.

Attachment Size
MuseScore.png 169.57 KB

Comments

The usual approach would be to change the screen resolution on your laptop, via some kind of control panel or preferences pane. (I don't have Windows 8, so I don't know exactly.) Have you tried that? What happened?

In reply to by Timborino

If I change my resolution to 1366x768, it's still very small, although it seems a bit larger than at 3200x1800. It's readable, but just barely.

I don't recall this problem with my old laptop, which was also Win 8, but had a native resolution of 1366x768.

Normally in Win 8.1, you can just bump up the size of all items without changing the resolution (control panel: change the size of all items). This acts like the magnifier tool applied to the whole screen (so it makes text and icons and buttons larger). It magnifies the text of the MuseScore Connect, but not enough to make it readable.

As far as I know there is no 64bit version of MuseScore on Windows. Are you running a self build version of 1.3 or did you download it from musescore.org?

Could you test one of the last development version for Windows http://prereleases.musescore.org/windows/nightly/ and see if the problem is fixed. It would be great because none of the developers has such a high end hardware to test this bug.

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

Could be a Windows 8 thing - my Windows 8 desktop is 1920 X 1200 resolution and the text in the Connect dialogue is too small to read in both 1.3 and the MuseScore 2 unstable development version.

The problem being that if you reduce resolution you can end up with menus not fitting on the screen - my graphics dialogue warns about resolutions below 1536 x 1080

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

I am using the 32 bit version downloaded from the website. Sorry about that confusion.

I tested the last development version (From Nov. 15), and it has the same issue.

I did notice that when I change the display size in Win 8.1 (not the resolution, but the amount of magnification that is applied to the entire screen), the Connect information changes. Unfortunately, because I use that setting on maximum, I can decrease the amount of magnification, which makes the Connect information even smaller.

As one of the others metioned, I would guess it has to do with DPI.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I think I know what the problem is, since I had the same exact problem on another open source program called Shotcut. The scaling issue is connected with QT. (By the way, I'm now on Win10, but I'm running the same laptop).

The fix that the Shotcut developers suggested was to set an environmental variable in cmd.exe before launching the program.

set QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO=2
c:\program files (x86)\musescore\musescore.exe

The variable only seems to work with setting the environmental variable to a whole number (2 or 3, not 1.75 or 2.5). Apparently, there is also an "auto" function within QT that may be able to set the variable automatically, but I don't know how it works.

This documents some of the high DPI issues: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/highdpi.html

In reply to by thegreatlefkowitz

Unfortunately, the way resolution and font info is represented by the OS and presented to MuseScore via Qt seems to differ from OS to OS. So the same high resolution display might look different on Windows versus Linux versus in terms of which aspects of the MuseScore UI are automatically resized correctly and which are not, also in terms of what you can do about it.

The environment variable you mention might have the desired effect on some systems, it might not. As of 2.0, MuseScore also implements an option "-x " to allow you to specify a scaling factor to be applied to UI elements (other than the main application font itself, which is taken directly from the OS). But this works as expect on some systems, not on others, do the aforementioned differences. High DPI is still a bit of a mess, really, not just in MuseScore but in general.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for the explanation. HiDPI does seem like a mess, and there are definitely times I wish I had a lower resolution laptop.

The "-x" option is great. I didn't know about that.

For me, setting the QT pixel ratio variable seems to scale everything perfectly. I set the variable as a global variable in Windows, so all I have to do is run MuseScore, and the scaling is seamless.

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