Extremely small previews for the styles preview in Writer in tabbed view

Hello,

I hope I’m in the right place in this forum and shouldn’t have gone to a KDE Plasma forum. I’m having “problems” previewing paragraph styles in Writer when using the tabbed layout for the user interface (which I prefer). I am using a high resolution moditor (UHD) with KDE Plasma (6.2.5) with Wayland. The rest of the UI is scaled reasonably and is easy to read, only the area marked on the screenshot is not, you simply can’t see anything. Do you have any advice or a solution for this? I seem to be the only one with this problem, as I couldn’t find a question about it anywhere else, but I’ve had the problem on every Plasma system so far, whether outdated with Debian or current with Arch.

I tested on my Fedora 41 KDE Plasma and stylename is “normal” abeit clipped.

Since the name is a preview of the style, what is its font size? If too large, I get your problem. The area alloted to style preview has a fixed size, not expanding with style properties.

I noticed your screen is 4K. What is its pixel density? You seem to compensate with a zoom factor of 140%. You may have chosen too small a size for this definition, resulting in a high-dpi resolution, making pixels too small for ordinary vision (1 arc-minute on average).

That’s a good point!
I tried it and found that the higher you set the global scaling, the worse it gets. My default scaling is 175%. Anything below that is too small for me and above that it gets a little too big. Only at 100% does it scale correctly.

Unfortunately I can’t show you screenshots because new users are not allowed to send media in replies, but trust me only at 100% it looks good and at (e.g. 225%) catastrophic, you only have one letter and no preview.

I deliberately bought 22" HD (1920×1080) screens so that I have the “magic” 1 arc-minute resolution at my viewing distance. My zoom factor is then 100%. With 2 monitors, I have half a 4K screen.

My monitor measures 27 inches and has 3840*2160 pixels. I just love the high resolution and the more space it offers compared to my old 24 inch monitor with FullHD, and almost everywhere there is some solution for scaling, just not this one part of LibreOfficeWriter under KDE. I guess it’s due to a missing feature (bug?) in libreoffice-kde, which is a kind of translation layer for LibreOffice on QT for Plasma. Probably the scaling factor for the style preview is missing, because the rest of the UI is scaled correctly (and not pixelated).

From computation, your screen is roughly 163dpi. The optimal distance is ~53 cm which is too close on a desk top. My screens are 70+ cm far away from my sitting position and this is nearly too close. For comfortable vision with a 4K monitor, I’d consider one in 38-40" range. That’s beginning to be really large over a desk but takes maximum profit of eye capability… And perhaps LCD technology requires a curved screen to avoid vignetting and colour distortion.

That may be, but my monitor is already as far back on my desk as possible and I can’t/won’t buy a new desk and monitor. Sorry, but that’s no justification for an obvious problem either. Screens are simply getting higher and higher pixel densities.
Do you know where the responsible source code is, the one for this libreoffice-kde package or just the one that does the translation to QT? Is it part of the big LibreOfficee project or a separate project? I would (if I have time) look for the problem or at least (if it doesn’t exist yet) write a bug report, but I couldn’t find anything spontaneously.

Granted. These were only thoughts expressed aloud.

No. I am just (!) an (enlightened) user.
br>I gave a look at my System Settings. The Display & Screen module has a scale slider. Is this this one you call your “default scaling”?

My idea was to set this one so that you have a comfortable view of your text at 100% zoom factor in LO. But when I experimented, I discovered that LO or Qt retrieves this global scale factor and applies an inverse factor on the tool bars so that they keep the same visual size. This is obvious when the window spans two screen (one with 100%, the second at 300%). The window elements are scaled according to the global factor but the tool bars are “back-compensated”. Text itself seems to react to LO zoom factor only so that it is not affected by the global scaling (once again global scaling is “compensated” and zoom factor is applied on the result). But this occurs only if window does not span two screens, in which case one of the bits is magnified and line don’t correspond across screens.

I don’t know where the “correction” are done. It could be done within LO so that text always looks at its point size despite global scaling, it could also be done in the window manager window per window (explaining why a split window is correct on the left monitor and zoomed on the right one). It could be done in Qt so that widgets always have the same requested size (human-specified) regardless of the global setting.

Only a developer could tell.