The menus and icons on my Trial Pro version are too small to see. I have tried the various options on my Intel HD graphics 5300 options and settings and changing the menu size in the windows display settings. No luck. Also right clicking the menu bar. The size option is grayed out. Control ++ doesn’t work. I have a new Lenovo Yoga Pro 3 with windows 8.1 64 bit. Please Help.
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I suspect your laptop has a high res screen of some sort. There have been some problems with sketchup not being adjustable to the tiny pixel screens.
View > Toolbars… > Options > Large Icons
Is it checked ?
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It was not, but when I checked it (I could hardly see it), it did not help.
See view of screen attached.
The Yoga 3 is not inferior to the Yoga 2, and as such it has at least the same high-density display, and SketchUp still continues suffering under this disease. It is a UI problem, not an OpenGL/graphics driver problem and not configurable.
It is likely that a cure takes until the next major release. Until then, take a look at the list of proposed work-arounds:
Would this also be the solution when all the “add on ruby” extensions are small like shown above, but on the same screen the native Sketchup Icons are the larger size you would expect to see? (SU 2017 PRO)
Thanks, Mate
This is an old thread when v2015 was current. Since this time SketchUp 2016 and 2017 have added High DPI awareness that can resize Ruby tool button icons but only IF the programmer revised their extension with SVG images (Windows) or PDFs (for Mac.) The extension developer must also have called a 2016+ Ruby method to load the new vector button images.
So, … the most likely culprit is you are using old out of date extensions. Always download new versions when you install a new SketchUp version. So do not manually copy extensions from older SketchUp installations.
I will recheck, thanks! I was using the extension manager to check if things were up to date, I’ll go back and check the recently loaded extensions again one at a time manually. Thanks, Matte
Hi Dan an All, Just went through and cleared up all the extensions, some were over a year old. But still… All native “buttons” (Except the one for shadows which is small) are normal “expected” size. But ALL extensions take up 1/4 the real-estate (1/2 the width and also 1/2 the height…Maybe smaller? Sort of “funny” I could see if I had resolution too high, ALL buttons might be too small, but the mix is quite surprising. Thanks, Matte
Just to be sure: By “ALL extensions take up 1/4 the real-estate” you mean only the extension toolbar button icon size, not other UI elements (webdialogs etc.)?
This is a problem of incapabilities of the UI toolkit, unfortunate API design and not all the extension developers having updated their icons.
What SketchUp originally did, is to tell developers “Give me an image of exactly 24px size” (API design). Since the UI toolkit does not upsample/scale small image files to fill the larger buttons, they now tell developers to provide a rather too large image file. But this can only solve the problem if extension developers are aware of this issue (not everyone has a large screen) and have or are able to create a larger icon and update their extensions. It’s not the extension developers fault if they provided icons to a specified size (rather than voluntarily a larger size) and SketchUp changes the meaning of their API rather than changing their software to compensate for their old API (i.e. make icons fit buttons).
Workaround:
Open your file manager and navigate to the folders of your extensions. Look for icon files (small .png images) and scale them with an image editor (to at least 48px, rather larger because too large image will be displayed to just fit the button).
Not sure, but can you check Is there any relationship with this?
Well, the relationship is at least the DPI. But the other thread does not have an ultimate solution either since SketchUp still has remaining DPI problems.
Thanks!!! I was thinking of tracking down each small icon and re-scale it…but I was a little chicken to try it. Thanks for giving me courage to try it. Also thanks also for mentioning the mentioning the 48px as a place to start. i’ll try a few buttons and let everyone how it goes. Thanks again, Matte
I’d encourage you test test against a known updated extension that has vector icons.
The Trimble Dynamic Components extension should have them.
I went through my backup extension library, erased all the old extensions, uploaded the new ones and also installed them into sketchup using the extension manager… I was going to try and track down the extension icons and increase the scale of the developers icons to test if this helps… does anyone know where I can find them? It’s a little trickier to track down than I thought it would be?
Thanks, Matte
Ok, Re-Verified, Icon size large option was checked. I deleted all older extensions, and moved all the newest ones to the proper User…Plugin folder where they should have been all along.
Then installed them through the Sketchup extension manager
Then I located where all the extension toolbar icons are that are coming in as too small.
As mentioned there are a 12x and a 24x png image in each reference folders
Heres what the GUESSING BEGINS? (Please let me whats wrong!!!, probably everything!!!)
- Im guessing the 12x is linked to the Sketchup small Icon choice and the 24x to the large icon check box?
- As I dont want to mess with the creaters code… I took a 24x icon did as (Save-As) and made a 48x icon in Photoshop.
-Because it is more “blurry” I cleaned and sharpened it than saved it into the location of the developers 12x and 24x location.
-I am quessing in the code it links to whatever the 12x image is to the small icon choices
-And if you check the large icon “box” it grabs and uses the 24x
-Sosince I have limited knowledge, to link the new 48x icon is out of my abilities…but
-A can do a (Save-As) of the 24x icon and save it as (24xoriginal) so the paths will ignore it,(And I can put it back if it doesnt work).
-Then rename the 48x image as 24x, so setup pathways will pick this 200% larger image.
??? How crazy is this way of thinking? I this does work, am I really screwing up things up?
Thanks, Matte
it worked fine for the inference dots when mac introduce Retina screen a few versions back…
the path just needs to be correct and the image and data is read from it’s content…
I often use 512 X 512 and SU still scales them…
you might even try using an.svg rename as as the original and see if SU pays any attention to the file extension name…
it may or may not, but you can bin it and restart…
john
Repeating myself.
I’d encourage you test test against a known updated extension that has vector icons.
The Trimble Dynamic Components extension should have them.
You never told us exactly what extensions were giving you problems, so it is we who are guessing.
Andreas does this actually work ?
I doubt that on Windows replacing a 24 pixel image with a 48 pixel image will work. I would expect the API will just shrink the 48 pixel image down to 24 pixel, making it blurry.
But I’ve never had a hi-DPI monitor to test this with, and the docs are not specific.
Anything in the release notes about this ?
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Old icons were 16px (small) and 24px (large) and were later recommended to 32px / 48px. The API changed semantics instead of adding a new method name or adding compatibility for the old semantics (displaying images larger).
This actually works (assuming one finds the image files to change).
The problem was exactly that the UI toolkit used on Windows does not scale/shrink raster icons to fit the button (however shrinks oversized raster icons, which we extension developers originally favored, but the designers preferred the famous “padding”). Vector icons are always scaled to fit the available space (no matter if pixel size is specified smaller or larger).
If the UI scale is 2×, the toolbar button has more available space, and a 48px icon is just displayed as it is (correct size), but a 24px icon is also displayed as it is (too small).
Renaming file extensions does not work because the file type is (as often) determined by the file name ending, not by magic bytes or mime types.
Probably one could also embed the raster image in a vector file (instead of vectorizing/redrawing it) and update the extension source code.
Ah, now that makes sense. Thanks.