Hi,

As you can see in the images, in Plasma Next all the elements such as the calendar and Kickoff menu are simply too big compared to the KDE 4.13 equivalents. I don't expect that they should be exactly the same but to have Kickoff almost reach the top of the screen and the calendar be over half the width of the screen seems too much no?





For both KDE 4.13 and Plasma Next I have the DPI set to 165. The screen is 1920*1080 and 13.3 inches diagonaly.

What do you think?
Is this some bug that will get fixed before release?

Many thanks

Probably a stupid question (but I have not tried Plasma Next yet in it's entirety), but can't you resize the widgets to be smaller? Or is that the minimum size they will shrink to?

Apparently they appear to be non-resizeable and that their current size is fit for a 1080p screen like mine :


I have no doubt that they will make Plasma Next fit better on lower resolutions. It's still too early to judge for now.

Thanks for the replies! My screen is also 1080p so it seems there is something wrong with my setup when it comes to Plasma Next.

It's strange because I've have made sure that the fonts are the same size between Plasma Next and 4.13.

xdpyinfo | grep -B2 resolution
screen #0:
dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (508x285 millimeters)
resolution: 96x96 dots per inch

Xorg always sets the DPI to 96 but using KDE System Settings I set it to the correct value, 165. However, changing the DPI in Plasma Next seems to have no effect on the size of the objects on screen.

Some progress! I deleted the .config .cache and .local folders for my test user and Plasma Next is behaving better with my 1080p screen.

It seems that changing the DPI or increasing the font size results in oversized Plasma elements. So, I think it's a scaling issue.

I think that at the moment, the behaviour of Plasma next is worse than 4.XX as I would like to have a larger font, without the objects such as Kickoff and the calendar being too big.

P

pepedopolous wrote:I think that at the moment, the behaviour of Plasma next is worse than 4.XX as I would like to have a larger font, without the objects such as Kickoff and the calendar being too big.

Plasma 4.x simply did not scale anything other than fonts with DPI, but it should. Scaling with DPI is important for adapting to high-DPI screens which become more and more common. See the reasoning behind the change here: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2014/02/reason ... asma-next/
What your experience shows, though, is a usability problem: Since in Plasma 4.x, DPI was used only to scale fonts, the setting for DPI was placed in the "Fonts" settings module. Now users, like you, continue to use it as a means for font scaling, but Plasma Next - correctly! - scales everything, which leads to a bad result.

If you only want bigger fonts but elements overall to stay the same size, try, instead of using the Force DPI setting, to just change the font sizes in the Fonts module. This should give you the desired results.

The size of UI elements depends on the font size. This is necessary to make sure all information always fits. Hardcoding the size would mean you change the font size, and suddenly nothing fits into the dialogs anymore. The spacing and sizing of the individual UI elements is a design choice, though. We found many of the UI in Plasma 1 way too cramped and misaligned. Therefore, changing the font size has the same effect as changing the DPI, as they both result in bigger fonts (as rendered).

Thanks for your replies. I accept that the problem has been solved. Perhaps there should be a setting for users to adjust the scaling factor to their liking instead of the more technical DPI and font settings?

P

Adjusting the scaling factor doesn't really make sense. Dialogs need to know what has to fit into them. Take the calendar as example. We can do two things:

1) hardcode the size to a minimum size, assuming the user has a certain font size and DPI
2) tell the dialog: You need to fit 20 rows of text, and be roughly 60 chars wide

1) breaks as soon as the user changes the font size or the display has a higher DPI: suddenly the fonts are growing so big that the assumptions we made don't hold true, the fonts grows, but the dialog size stays the same: you get clippings and the balance between text and whitespace goes down the drain. You see this happening in the Plasma 1 calendar, which basically takes this approach.

2) Means that everything scales with the fonts as they appear on your screen. If a dialog should hold six rows of text, it will do so, regardless of the font setting or DPI. The dialog gets a physical size, which depends on the size of the fonts. (Same holds for spacing.)

This means that across devices, UI will have similar sizes. Not as a "fraction of the screen height", but expressed in almost physical terms (guided by readability and space needed, insteed of guessed and hoped that displays don't vary too wildly).

Fair enough. It seems to me though that if I want a DPI of 165 and a font size of 9, Kickoff and the calendar are unnecessarily big compared to their 4.X versions.


P