Very small font on Ubuntu
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@Dancer18 Thatโs the wrong advice. Never ever edit
common.css
. We have a whole forum board dedicated to preventing people from doing that. Vivaldi has inbuilt CSS modifications which can be toggled fromvivaldi://experiments
and set in appearance settings. Then you change the font in a CSSย file and it will automatically get loaded on every start and after every update. -
@luetage Yes, you are right of course. However, I did so, added that code to my custom.css, but without any change in font style.
Now, as you have insisted to do it with custom.css, I checked it and found that I had mistakenly copied the closing "}" from the code above into it.
Now, it seems to work fine and I edited my post above. -
@Pathduck said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
My guess would be DPI Scaling.
I did think of that at one point, but because Vivaldi has tinier text than the other browsers, I wasn't sure that DPI was the issue. It's still possible, but I'm going to try the suggestions regarding custom.css before I mess with DPI settings.
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@JoelYoung Your title is "small font" but then later you said:
"Tabs, toolbar, taskbar, even the side panel icons are very small"This indicates to me it's not font size - its scaling.
What's your display's native resolution and its dimensions (inches)?
Did you try the command line I posted?You could do the CSS fix, I wouldn't recommend it and I don't think that's the best solution here.
Vivaldi has UI zoom already (Settings > Appearance)
And you can set webpage zoom (Settings > Webpages)If you use CSS that will only change the UI font. It'll do zilch for tiny icons and other UI elements. And it won't change web page scaling.
Trying to change the size of UI icons through CSS would be a Sisyphean task... -
@Pathduck said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
My guess would be DPI Scaling...
...To test, you can launch Vivaldi with a command line flag:
--force-device-scale-factor=1.5
That's the entire command? The terminal doesn't need to know what it is I'm trying to force scale on?
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@JoelYoung Of course not
Something like this I guess:
vivaldi --force-device-scale-factor=1.5
I don't know how it works on Linux, probably the
vivaldi
command is already a wrapper for a script to launch the program. In Windows it would bevivaldi.exe
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@Pathduck said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
@JoelYoung Of course not
Something like this I guess:
vivaldi --force-device-scale-factor=1.5
I don't know how it works on Linux, probably the
vivaldi
command is already a wrapper for a script to launch the program. In Windows it would bevivaldi.exe
Yeah I'm still getting to know the Linux commands, so I need to research it.
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@JoelYoung Yeah, Linux requires some research to use.
Note that this command line flag is only for testing if your issue is related to DPI Scaling (or lack of it...)
The best solution would be to figure out how to apply DPI Scaling is your OS so that all programs have a readable size for icons and text. A quick web search finds these relevant articles:
https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/look-resolution.html.en
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/12opfws/how_to_do_125_display_scale_on_ubuntu
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/ubuntu-20-04-fractional-scaling-support-setting
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/per-monitor-scaling/26716 -
--force-device-scale-factor=1.5
is not a good idea. I'm on Linux and tried it, adding this parameter to starter command. [Or is it intended to use it elsewhere? In flags somewhere? I haven't found any flag to customize that way...]
It causes the resolution to be much coarser (like old 640x480) , but the aim is simply to make the fonts a little fatter and bigger, as I understood.And this also depends on
common.css
settings, as I wrote above, concerning the font family that the programmers selected for Linux. Keep in mind that they have other font family for Windows and Mac.You also could change the
Zoom UI
a bit in the settings. But not with factor 1.5.
I prefer110%
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I just tried fractional scaling in the Ubuntu settings, but the choices are limited. It goes from 100% (default) to 125%, which makes everything larger but less sharp. They could use a 110% setting, which would probably be fine.
Having a hard time finding exactly how to actually change DPI settings anywhere online.
One thing I noticed: On my 17" Windows laptop the resolution is 1600x900 default, which is just right.
The Ubuntu laptop, also 17", defaults to 1920x1080, which of course affects the size of everything.If I change it to 1600x900, everything is much better size-wise, but could use a little scaling down - but not by much.
But maybe I'll just have to get used to it.
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@JoelYoung Why so modest? You made the comparison with Windows at the beginning and noted that the fonts in Linux seem smaller and thinner.
Why should people just get used to it? It could and should be reprogrammed. At the very least, I think there should be better setting options.
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@JoelYoung Yes, it's the same in Windows - you only have 100, 125, 150% etc. Probably some good technical reason for this...
The whole point of DPI Scaling is to apply a uniform scaling level to all GUI programs to make them larger/more readable - while still making them look good/sharp - independent of screen resolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independenceObviously If you're running 4K on a 17" laptop screen - there's no way you'll even be able to read the text without perfect 20/20 vision
Back in the CRT screen days we would just change the resolution, but new LCD/LED monitors look like total crap running in non-native resolutions so that's not a good solution at all and should be avoided.
There's a difference between looking bad/pixelated and simply larger. If things look like crap when scaled that's probably a problem in your OS scaling combined with your Desktop Environment/GPU driver how well it handles scaling.
Some programs don't scale well either - in Windows old programs that don't support scaling will look very blurry. While for instance Qt applications often get the scaling rounding factor wrong - resulting in either too large or too small UIs.
My recommendation would be to use OS scaling and then do minor adjustments in Vivaldi's UI Zoom level.
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@Dancer18 said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
@JoelYoung ...It could and should be reprogrammed. At the very least, I think there should be better setting options.
100% agree, and yet who am I? lol. A newbie to Linux going up against decades of Linux developers who make the decisions.
If I knew how, I'd create my own distro!
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@JoelYoung The Vivaldi programmers in particular listen to user feedback more often than average. I wrote this article, for example, as mentioned above.
I got the answer: It only is a matter of time.I am therefore confident that this issue will be off the table in the near future.
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@JoelYoung said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
I just tried fractional scaling in the Ubuntu settings, but the choices are limited. It goes from 100% (default) to 125%, which makes everything larger but less sharp. They could use a 110% setting, which would probably be fine.
Having a hard time finding exactly how to actually change DPI settings anywhere online.
One thing I noticed: On my 17" Windows laptop the resolution is 1600x900 default, which is just right.
The Ubuntu laptop, also 17", defaults to 1920x1080, which of course affects the size of everything.If I change it to 1600x900, everything is much better size-wise, but could use a little scaling down - but not by much.
But maybe I'll just have to get used to it.
Or maybe you could try another Ubuntu flavor like Kubuntu, which has more "sane" defaults, scaling steps of 5% and extra options to set just the font dpi.
In the latest KDE Plasma version (6, not availabe in Kubuntu yet) which uses Wayland as the display protocol you can set the scaling <100% (though you can't set the font dpi).You could take a small "online-drive" from here and see if it suits you.
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@JoelYoung I'm running Debian 12 with Gnome desktop... Not sure if you can make use of the Gnome Tweak Tool or not but it makes System font adjustment a whole lot easier along with Scaling and Hinting:
7 Ways to Customize Your Linux Desktop With GNOME Tweaks Tool
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@lfisk said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
@JoelYoung I'm running Debian 12 with Gnome desktop... Not sure if you can make use of the Gnome Tweak Tool or not but it makes System font adjustment a whole lot easier along with Scaling and Hinting:
7 Ways to Customize Your Linux Desktop With GNOME Tweaks Tool
Thanks. I did play around with that, but what I found is that while it can improve Vivaldi, it also affects every other browser, app and system fonts & icons.
Everything changes in relation to the defaults, so something that looked pretty good now doesn't look good. -
/edited: I wrote some things about scaling again but you know what, everything's really bad with Vivaldi's monstrous menu size on top of everything now. What a mess.
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@npro said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
@JoelYoung said in Very small font on Ubuntu:
I just tried fractional scaling in the Ubuntu settings, but the choices are limited. It goes from 100% (default) to 125%, which makes everything larger but less sharp. They could use a 110% setting, which would probably be fine.
Having a hard time finding exactly how to actually change DPI settings anywhere online.
One thing I noticed: On my 17" Windows laptop the resolution is 1600x900 default, which is just right.
The Ubuntu laptop, also 17", defaults to 1920x1080, which of course affects the size of everything.If I change it to 1600x900, everything is much better size-wise, but could use a little scaling down - but not by much.
But maybe I'll just have to get used to it.
Or maybe you could try another Ubuntu flavor like Kubuntu, which has more "sane" defaults, scaling steps of 5% and extra options to set just the font dpi.
In the latest KDE Plasma version (6, not availabe in Kubuntu yet) which uses Wayland as the display protocol you can set the scaling <100% (though you can't set the font dpi).You could take a small "online-drive" from here and see if it suits you.
Looking at Kubuntu, and I'm kinda liking it.