Enable scaling for legacy programs / individual X11 windows?

Budgie Desktop
1

I am having trouble with scaling issues for certain programs.

For example I use R for statistics, and when plot windows are created (which I believe uses X11), they are incredibly small on my 3200x1800 display, even when I’m useing 200% scaling.

If I switch to a lower resolution for the monitor (1920x1080 with 100% scaling), the plot windows are a readable size, but everything else looks quite blurry and lacks clarity.

Is there a way to enforce the 200% scaling for these programs, or is there a way that I can preserve the sharpness when applying lower resolutions to the entire screen?

[Im using Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 on a Dell XPS 13 9343]

2

I am not familiar with the app in question.

If it’s written in something like gtk2 the you are out of luck … gtk2 support ended years ago and those types of apps didn’t support scaling.

All apps need to be written in newer technologies such as Qt5 or gtk3 to support scaling.

3

Quick google - some people rate this script

https://github.com/kaueraal/run_scaled

As long as you install the dependencies xvfb and xpra (don’t do this if you are using 18.04 and the HWE stack) the script scales any application you run. So you could you full resolution - and just for those specific apps run via

./run_scaled appname