Re: [trinity-devel] TDE on dense small screens - tde-devels

12 Dec 2017

On Monday 11 December 2017, E. Liddell wrote:
...
  On Sat, 9 Dec 2017 19:21:19 -0800
 Vincent Reher &lt;tde(a)4reher.org&gt; wrote:

  The remaining issue concerns TDE window/menu
controls that are too small.  These include window resizing double-arrows, window
scrollbar and associated up and down arrows, the menu-submenu right arrow, list
expand-collapse (+/-) controls, checkboxes, and radio buttons.

 I suspect that these resources are part of QT3 but don't really know for sure.  I
suspect QT3 because applications that do not use that toolkit (e.g. LibreOffice and
Firefox) do not manifest the problem. 

 I am hoping that somebody more knowledgeable about GUI configuration and programming can
point me in the right direction.  Is this something that can be corrected via a
configuration file (e.g. qtrc)?  If not, can somebody point me to where in in the source
code tree I should be looking and what I would need to do to correct this?  
 Widget appearances are dictated by the style code, which is applied by QT3.  You would 
 have to either fix QT3 or create a new widget style to make everything correctly
HiDPI-sensitive.  
 However, you *may* be able to improve your experience somewhat by selecting the
"High 
 Contrast" style and turning on "Use wider lines" in its configuration. 
This will make most widgets 
 somewhat larger.  It isn't the most elegant style, though.

 If you are interested in authoring your own widget style (requires C++ knowledge, 
 unfortunately), you can find existing styles in tdelibs/tdestyles and tdeartwork/styles.

 If you want to patch QT3 directly, my guess is that you would have to look at
 qt3/src/styles/qcommonstyle.cpp , which has a lot of size-related magic constants
 you could play with.

 E. Liddell

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Thanks, your message was very helpful in clarifying a path forward. I tried the High
Contrast style and while I agree that its appearance leaves a lot to be desired, it did
seem to remedy matters by presenting larger more visible window/menu controls.  That says
to me that modifying an existing style might provide a solution to the problem at hand. 
Perhaps that won't be as modern a solution as a true "it just works" dynamic
scaling of these graphical controls, but it will be good enough for me if it allows me to
run TDE on laptops such as these at native resolution.

Interestingly, one of the things that was not corrected by that style was the really tiny
window resizing cursor.  I investigated further and noticed that my favorite cursor theme
"Xfree theme redglass" now has an annotation "incomplete for TDE" -- 
I had never noticed that before.  I guess the theme is incomplete because it lacks the
"redglass" window resizing cursor.  Without it, this particular cursor becomes
"Adwaita", a theme that apparently doesn't scale at all.  I guess I will
also have to learn how to "complete" the redglass theme.

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