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Blurry cursors on high-dpi screen

Summary:

All custom Inkscape cursors are blurry on high-dpi display in KDE.

Here's zoomed-in example:

image image

For comparison, this is default cursor on my system, nice and sharp:

image

Steps to reproduce:

  • open Inkscape
  • make sure "enable cursor scaling" if off (preferences)
  • flip between Select tool and Node tool
  • observe the cursors

What happened?

  • cursor bitmaps are upscaled and blurry

What should have happened?

  • cursors should be razor-sharp

It appears that GTK scales cursor bitmaps up causing them to look blurry. This sorry state is not really Inkscape's fault, but I wish it was possible to fix it.

Inkscape's "enable cursor scaling" just works on top of what GTK does, resulting in gigantic and blurry cursors.

I can disable scaling by exporting GDK_SCALE=1, but then UI gets tiny, along with cursors.

Effectively the issue would be solved if we could tell Gdk window set_cursor to use the cursor bitmap as-is. I tried passing pixbuf options "x-dpi" and "y-dpi" before creating cursor (cursor_utils.cpp:164) but they appear to be ignored.

Note: I think older Inkscape versions (1.0 and before) suffer from the same affliction, but perhaps its bitmap cursors make it less obvious.

Version Info:

- Inkscape Version: 1.1-dev (2d58738ffd, 2020-12-11, custom)
- Operating System: Kubuntu Linux
- Operating System version: 20.04
- KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5
- KDE Frameworks Version: 5.68.0
- Kernel Version: 5.4.0-56-generic
- OS Type: 64-bit
- display global scale: 200% (font dpi: 192)
Edited by Mike Kowalski
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