Many popups and dialogs are oversized on a 1920x1080 monitor with 1.5x UI scaling

• Dec 1, 2020 - 10:10
Reported version
3.5
Type
Graphical (UI)
Frequency
Once
Severity
S4 - Minor
Reproducibility
Always
Status
duplicate
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project

#306644: Preferences window doesn't match on a 15'' Laptop screen and height isn't resizeable fixed an oversized "Preferences" dialog which was extending off the edge of the screen.

However, working on Windows 10 with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 and 1.5x UI scaling (an effective resolution of 1280x720), there are many other dialogs and popups which are oversized to the point of causing UI glitches or ergonomic problems:

  • "Parts", "Mixer", "Plugin Creator" and "Piano Roll Editor" extend off the bottom of the screen.

  • "Instruments", "Resource Manager" and "Transpose" are just barely less tall than the screen.

  • The "View" menu is exactly the same height as the screen, which makes it impossible to switch to the "Add", "Format", "Tools", "Plugins" and "Help" menus while the "View" menu is open. This breaks flow if I'm navigating across all of the main menus while searching for a specific menu item.

  • The "Style" dialog is too narrow for its contents, so the right-hand panel ends up with an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar. The left-hand list, and the list of text styles, are both at least twice as wide as they need to be.

  • The left-hand list in the "Master Palette" is more than twice as wide as it needs to be.


Comments

Workaround Yes No

On Windows 10, the suggested workaround only appears to affect icon size, not text size, so the layout of dialogs and menus is unaffected.

Status active duplicate

Unfortunately, there is a ton of variety in how different systems present resolution info to applications, so it's difficult to always do the right thing by default or to have only a single override always to the right thing. Luckily, there are other possible workarounds. On some systems, the "-x" option (specifying a magnification factor) may work better. On others, setting (or unsettling) the environment variable QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR may do the trick. On others still, it may be necessary to explicitly set either icon or text size within Edit / Preferences. And then there are the OS-specific overrides - like on Windows, in the Properties for the application (".exe" file) itself, there are a number of scaling overrides available, and one of those may do the trick.

See #106241: Monitor resolution detected incorrectly, making sizes wrong for further disucssion.

Thanks for responding!

It occurs to me that, even if the underlying resolution-detection problem can't be fixed (?), this bug would still be ameliorated if the UI layout were made slightly smaller. For example, removing a few items from the "View" menu, or moving them into submenus, would make the "View" menu less vulnerable to resolution-detection errors.

Changing the UI so that it can tolerate proportionally larger font sizes seems worthwhile for accessibility reasons, if nothing else.

Workaround No Yes

If the View menu is too long, the Edit > Preferences and the Format Style dialogs won't fit at all either, even in their smaller 3.6 versions
Try a smaller scaling, like 1,25x

Yes; I'm suggesting that, as well as the "View" menu being made shorter, dialogs such as "Preferences" and "Format Style" should also be made less tall.

I appreciate your work in improving the "Preferences" dialog, but I'll admit I was disappointed to see that its new size only had 10% less height. I suspect other users will continue to be affected by this bug.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

There is a limit, but shouldn't MuseScore "officially" support some "reasonable enough" screen size?
Height seems the more problematic parameter, O.P. is using (indirectly) 720px, if we take "complex" application as example such Adobe Photoshop, minimum height requirement is 800px.
Wouldn't it be a fair assumption that MuseScore dialog should be usable on height 800px 100% scale factor?