Usually, I only use X11 because I don’t know much about windowing systems but in trying to help my sister get her super-duper laptop to use multiple screens of different resolution, we switched it to use wayland such that can set the scaling differently for each screen. That worked fine.
However, now Libre office appears very small while other applications look pretty normal.
Would you please point me to where I can learn how to fix this, if possilbe?
Thank you.
Libreoffice needs a serious overhaul of its gui. It is one of the ugliest piece of software there is. I know that it is only for “writing” and doesn’t really need much of a gui, however, if you are not familiar with the keyboard shortcuts and not a word processor expert, you need to use all those buttons and oh boy, the buttons on that thing are a nightmare.
I know it is not the same thing but, i have “calligra office” (complete office suite) and “abiword” (ms word alternative) installed. They look so much better with wayland. In any case, if you needed absolute MS office support, you’d probably use MS office somehow, so these two might suffice your needs maybe.
Thanks. We don’t need to have documents work with MS office, so switching should not be an issue for that reason. I ididn’t realize that Calligra was a KDE product. We’ll take a look at it.
As is often the case, the Calligra Suite is another example of applications ‘taken under the wing’ of KDE; to be enhanced or exploited in their own timeframe.
GhostWriter is another example of an application I’ve been waiting several years for KDE to do anything substantial with.
You may be pleased to know that LibreOffice has settings available that might help with the issue you describe; specifically, the ability to control icon sizes in the Toolbar, Notebookbar and Sidebar.
The “Large” or “Extra Large” settings might go some way toward working around the problem (though not having a super-duper-large screen, I’m unable to test this for you).
… just something that occurred to me:
there are two versions of Libre Office
libreoffice-still (the older one)
and
libreoffice-fresh (more current)
Which one is the issue with here?
Is it perhaps different with the other version?
I’m not promoting it - I rarely have to use an office suite.
I mostly need to write letters - and use Lyx for that.
This is partially true, but the problem here is related to scaling and resolution.
So whilst it’s possible to start guessing, there is ‘intelligent’ scripting to alter the scale of the display according to the display characteristics in Wayland; it’s an improvement, but possibly an issue in this case (i.e. it detects resolution but has an issue not realising the density - i.e. small 1080 screen vs TV screen) and display protocols (multiple non-matching displays).
It is possible to specify: Writer is too small, so let’s make it 150%:
QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1.5 libreoffice --writer
You could make this permanent (but don’t forget, krunner will remember it), but what we’ll do is create a custom launch (and you could feasibly come up with a personal custom icon):
You can use TAB to see other options (for Libreoffice) as there’s Writer, Calc etc…
cp -avi /usr/share/applications/libreoffice-⭾ TAB
So let’s do writer whilst renaming to ‘150’ for the size:
cp /usr/share/applications/libreoffice-writer.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/writer-150.desktop
Now edit that (using kate for this guide because we can use CtrlR for Search 'n Replace).
Exec=QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=0.5 libreoffice --writer
Now this should come up from your main menu or krunner with the new name.
Thank you, all.
@soundofthunder We tried those settings, just now, and they didn’t make a difference; they didn’t appear to make any difference at all. Perhaps that means we don’t have something else setup correctly also.
@anon33601770 We had the fresh version installed and now tried still; and it looks much better. On the laptop’s higher resolution it looks “normal” and on the external display it looks quite a bit larger than normal. But at least she can work with it on the laptop while viewing something else on the external screen.
@Ben Thanks for the detailed instructions; we’ll give it a try shortly.
In what capacity is it small?
On my display 5120x1440 LibreOffice has the same size as other applications (libreoffice-fresh).
The font and the icons are very small. The text is about unreadable unless your eye is a few inches from the screen. The size of the window and containers still fill the screen as usual.
That is using Wayland with an external display attached of a different resolution and scaliing. I’m almost 100% certain that Libre Office looked normal on her 3840 laptop screen when there was not an external display attached. When scaled to 200% just about all applications looked fine; it is only an issue when she tries to connect an external display and, I assume, one of a different resolution. We don’t have an external monitor of the same resolution to test that out.
I think this is a common issue with Plasma when using scaling per display.
One option is to experiment with the Legacy scaling options for X11 using the Display page in System Settings
Another option - if the system is using stable branch - it may be beneficial to switch to unstable branch - as this will provide Plasma 6.4.3 where this may have improved.
The Wayland scaling issues seem to be fixed with libreoffice-fresh 24.2.1-5
It could also mean you didn’t fully close LibreOffice, and re-open it for the settings to become effective. Otherwise, those settings seem to work as expected.
Regards.