How to fix small GUI on Mendeley Desktop?

Question

I installed Mendeley desktop on my laptop which has a high DPI screen (3200x1800). The GUI is extremely tiny and I've tried googling ways to force the GUI to be larger or adapt it for my screen to no avail. I really would like a way to make it larger as I will be using a lot and it will save my eyes from having to try to see very tiny buttons and text.

Is there a way to do this?

Thank you!

Solution 1

You can upscale the entire interface---including fonts---by running Mendeley from terminal using the command

QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.2 mendeleydesktop

You can also play around with running it with the auto-scale factor on, using

QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1 mendeleydesktop

This does not scale up the font, but seems to break look at pdf's. They also work in conjunction, but is till break looking at pdf's:

 QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1 QT_SCALE_FACTOR=0.7 mendeleydesktop

Solution 2

QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1 QT_SCALE_FACTOR=0.7 mendeleydesktop

Thank you Rasmus, this worked for me.

To make it permanent I added to the launch_mendeley_desktop() method of the /usr/bin/mendeleydesktop file the following lines to set the environment variables:

os.environ["QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR"] = "1"
os.environ["QT_SCALE_FACTOR"] = "0.7"

Comments

[cauchy]

Works also for me. While I don't like the fact that now the fonts look ugly, this is better than nothing.

[BlueCoder]

I had a similar issue - after upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 Mendeley had enormous fonts. Using QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.0 restored correct settings. I tried to make it permanent by putting it inside launcher file but it didn't help as somehow it got rewritten every time. Changing /usr/bin/mendeleydesktop (it's a python file) by adding os.environ["QT_SCALE_FACTOR"] = "1.0" at the end of the set_environment function did the trick. Thanks IlBaroneRampante!