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I recently installed STEAM and webcamstudio on my UBUNTU machine which is running a resolution of 1920 x 1080. I have found that these applications do not honor the system-wide font sizes, but use instead a different DPI which makes reading the menus very difficult as the text is very small.

Is there a way that I can change the settings so that the GUI font of these apps are not microscopic at this resolution?

6 Answers 6

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The HiDPI skin mentioned by the currently accepted answer is deprecated by the author, and it does not scale perfectly.

For those who are still looking for a good solution, there is actually a setting in Steam to do that.

Simply check "Steam" -> "Settings" -> "Interface" -> "Enlarge text and icons based on monitor size" and restart Steam. It will give you a perfect text size.

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  • this should really be the accepted answer, works perfectly
    – Dylan Cali
    Nov 9, 2018 at 1:10
  • Does not work with Ubuntu 16.04 and the version of Steam I just installed.
    – Evan
    Nov 30, 2018 at 7:40
  • Unfortunately, this does not work in Ubuntu 20.04.
    – Mohamed
    Jan 1, 2021 at 15:30
  • Did not work for me (22.04). Do you know if it does for the Snap too?
    – dm29
    Dec 7, 2023 at 15:59
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Currently steam hardcoded the font size on linux.

The only way I found to increase the font size is to use a HiDPI skin

Installation:

  1. Open terminal
  2. cd to your steam skin directory (see note)
  3. Clone the repo(you must have git installed sudo apt-get install git)

    git clone https://github.com/MoriTanosuke/HiDPI-Steam-Skin.git

Then open Steam and go to Settings->Interface. Choose the new skin "HiDPI-Steam-Skin"

NOTE: The exact path to the skins might be different depending on your installation.

It might be located at ~/.steam/skins/ or ~/.local/share/Steam/skins/.

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  • I seem to be stuck here with this solution. Steam does not recognize that this skin is available after I entered git clone https://github.com/MoriTanosuke/HiDPI-Steam-Skin.git in console. restarted Steam same problem. There is no option in Steam to change DIR for skins. May 26, 2016 at 22:34
  • @KalamalkaKid Have you tried both folder '~/.steam/skins/' and '~/.local/share/Steam/skins/'
    – jrandiny
    May 27, 2016 at 10:38
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I use KDE. I fixed this going to:

System Settings → Application Style → GNOME/GTK Application Style → GTK Themes → Fonts

There I picked a font and new size. In my case the displayed font was not active, meaning that what was seen was not applying. I just increased and decreased the font size, so that the setting was refreshed and it worked! I just had to restart my applications.

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for me this was the only solution that i could use: (after which i stopped searching).

run steam as

GDK_SCALE=2 steam

You can create a bash file with it on your path (like i did) or create a mysteam.desktop file in your ~/Desktop folder.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/2273701484002742496/

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It is probably caused by system default dpi scaling as i recently faced the same problem with sublime text 3. You should use default dpi that is '1'. if you change settings certain apps behave erraticly as they are made for certain resolutions and thus making a fuss in rendering process of gui.

To correct this just go to

System > Settings > Displays > Scale for menu and title bars

and change the scale to 1. this should solve the problem (restart your pc just in case :p ).

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  • i am actually using 1.5 as my tv is huge and running at 1080p. The problem is these apps arent obeying the global DPI setting. May 26, 2016 at 22:31
  • ya it is a pain. but try to use 1 or similar settings in which icons don't look shabby/blurred something like 1.35 or something like that. just play with it a little and you'll know. May 27, 2016 at 3:48
  • i dont think you understand. Some apps, like Steam and WebCamStudio are dont obey the global scaling factor, therefore become unreadable. This thread isnt about fixing the ones that do work (those are fine), its about apps like Wine and the ones i just mentioned that dont obey the scaling factor. May 27, 2016 at 5:46
  • ah...sorry for the bad reply May 27, 2016 at 6:19
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I was able to fix mine by going to:

System Settings -> Application Style -> GNOME Application Style (GTK)

and setting the font there for GTK themes to be the same as my system font.

Half my apps were fine, half were ugly fonts.

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  • Where did you find the "Application Style" setting?
    – Evan
    Nov 30, 2018 at 7:41

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