Change “system” font size in processing IDE (PDE) on Ubuntu

Question

I'm using the Processing PDE on my Ubuntu laptop, which has a high resolution display. The Processing PDE does not scale properly, as the rest of the system does. I can of course change the font in the editor, but the menus, console, ... are really tiny. I think PDE is a Java Swing application.

Is there a way (command line flag? environment variable? ...?) which allows increasing of the "system" font size in the applications?

Answer 1

The Processing editor is indeed a Swing application, and Swing applications have trouble with high resolution displays.

I haven't found a reliable fix for this yet, but you can widen your search to "java swing high resolution display" or something similar, as this problem is applicable to all Swing applications, not just Processing. It's also not just a problem with the font size. I've noticed that button sizes and whatnot will also be very small.

I know jEdit suffers from similar issues, as did eclipse until this latest version. You might look into what eclipse did to fix it on their end.

Honestly my fix has just been to lower my resolution to something that doesn't require scaling. That's not an optimal solution, but it works. I'd be curious to hear if you find a more reliable workaround.

See also:

• How can I scale fonts on a high resolution screen?
• How to set the DPI of Java Swing apps on Windows/Linux?
• https://superuser.com/questions/988379/how-do-i-run-java-apps-upscaled-on-a-high-dpi-display