Mouse cursor sizes are inconsistent within gtk2 apps

[Ben Romer]

After updating Ubuntu 14.04 yesterday I noticed that the mouse cursor size was changing inside of GTK2 applications. I have a 1920x1080 15" display running with the UI set to 1.25 scale. On GTK2 applications, the pointer changes size within applications. For example, in Pidgin, the pointer will appear enlarged within the text window for the conversation, but appears the normal smaller size in the border around the window, as well as in menus (both pop-up and drop-down), window title bar, and the toolbar above the reponse text window.

Firefox is also affected inside of the browser window, bookmark toolbar, and regular toolbars, and most oddly, the cursor changes size when clicking in a sub-folder of bookmarks. When the sub-folder opens, the cursor drops to the small size, but when the cursor enters the popped-open menu, it enlarges again. Pop-up menus in the browser window also change size from the larger cursor to the smaller one.

On a second system with a 1920x1080 20" display, with the UI set to 1.0 size, the cursor does not appear to change size, but if I change the scale to 1.25, the same problem occurs.

The problem does not occur in GTK3 applications or in Unity.

[Ben Romer (bromer)]

After some additional experimentation on the 15" system it appears that the problem is related to the org.gnome.applications.interface values being calculated.

On the 15" system I get these values:

At 1.0, Cursor-size is 30, text-scaling-factor is 1.0, scaling-factor is 1.
At 1.25, Cursor-size is 38, text-scaling-factor is 1.25, scaling-factor is 1.

On the 20" system:
At 1.0, Cursor-size is 24, text-scaling-factor is 1.0, scaling-factor is 1.
At 1.25, Cursor-size is 30, text-scaling-factor is 1.25, scaling-factor is 1.

If I set the screen scaling to 1.25, and then manually set the cursor size to 24 on the 15" system, when I reset the scaling-factor value to 0 or 1, the cursors on the 15" go back to matching sizes.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.