I am new to Cinelerra, and I have installed it on my Kubuntu 19.04 machine. But, I have a problem - the fonts are all but unreadable on my 28" 4K ASUS monitor. They are WAY too small - about 1/8" high at 3840x2160. I have searched and searched and can't find any kind of reference to changing the interface font size. There also doesn't appear to be any option in the program itself to do this.
How do I increase the font size? Basically, the program is worthless to me if I can't change the size of the fonts -- and I don't want to switch resolutions, because that causes problems of its own with the scaling of the Plasma interface.
This is NOT the best solution and in the future hopefully there will be scaled fonts so that 8K monitors work. But the below is from the manual. You can try this by starting Cinelerra from a window (instead of the app icon) with the following command:
BC_FONT_SCALE-1.5 /{your cinelerra directory path}/cin
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BC_FONT_SCALE=2.0 for changing the default size of the characters to be twice as big.
BC_ICON_SCALE=1.5 for changing the default size of the icons to be bigger; can change # to any.
You can increase the size of the characters in the fonts and icons on your Cinelerra system. This will make it easier to read the characters if you have trouble seeing the default small letters, which have been auto-scaled based on the window geometry. The user-friendly font/icon scaling default is 1 but you can set it to any decimal value. To defeat default auto scaling and get any size characters/fonts, override the setting via the previous 2 listed shell environment variables. A small change can result in BIG results.
"This is NOT the best solution and in the future hopefully there will be scaled fonts so that 8K monitors work. But the below is from the manual. You can try this by starting Cinelerra from a window (instead of the app icon) with the following command:
BC_FONT_SCALE-1.5 /{your cinelerra directory path}/cin"
Yeah, it doesn't work very well. It does increase the font size as I want, but the spacing on the text for the interface is all screwed up. It's not much of a solution, and it's a real limitation that there is no UI scaling adjustment option in the preferences. There REALLY needs to be one.
This is what it looks like with my scaling set to 2.5, which is about right for my monitor size (DeviantArt sta.sh link):
It's a mess, really. Thanks though.
Edit: Also, apparently the block quote option isn't working correctly. The quoted text originally didn't appear different from my text, which is why I put it in italics like that.
Unfortunately, development of a solution is hampered by the lack of equipment on our end -- we do not have a 4K monitor -- wish we did. Maybe we can find a cheap one somewhere to develop on.
It is it absolutely necessary to have a 4K monitor on hand to implement a UI scaling solution? You wouldn't know how it would look on a 4K monitor, without one, if you added code to do that, but at least some of us could try it out and see how well it works.
Time to try it out. There is a Ubuntu18 static tar at:
https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/downloads/#documentation
( https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/download/testing/cinelerra-5.1-ub18-x86_64-static.txz)
under the "file storage" icon. Also Ubuntu16 and Mint18 and will build any other requested by willing testers.
Testing involves just "using" it. You will have to start it from a window as in the following line (we found a scale of 2 works well on a 4K monitor):
BC_SCALE=2.5 {your cinelerra path}/bin/cin
BTW: 15,500 insertion and deletion lines is what had to be modified to make this work but is supposed to affect only the size of the windows, text, icons, and spacing. A little more information is available in the email message at:
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00674.html
It would be possible but probably not feasible without a real dedicated tester because of the 474 references -- I am not sure anyone could find the time to help and constantly provide email feedback. The scaling in Cinelerra is all over the place, it not only would apply to the letters and icons but all of the windows, obviously. A MantisBT on the website feature request issue #25 has the following information in it:
474 is the number of references in cin5/guicast code that would have to have X and Y scaled for hidpi. This is a relatively easy task, but in most cases this is simple scaling (which is not the same as re-packing). The widgets in the panel geometry will produce a kind of "grainy" result in cursor positions. Re-packing would require reworking the layout in all of the guis and plugins. Not impossible, but no small task.
Creation of a patch and testing would also require a graphics card that is capable of running in HiDPI mode, besides the 4K monitor.
A C programmer with an HiDPI monitor could handle this at a Level 2 or 3 (rating system of Level 1 being easiest and level 5 being hardest). We would get someone started and help all along the way. This would be the ideal approach for us to handle at this time.
For those who have QT5s maybe the workaround indicated in this thread will work:
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=84614&p=548900&hilit=HiDPI#p548900
We now have a cheap 4K monitor. I just have to convince GG to start working on Cinelerra scaling option for it this month.
