Inkscape UI is pixelated on Retina MacBooks

[Moritz Moeller]

See summary. Basically, an application's info.plist needs some key(s) added for OS X to not use pixel doubling on Retina displays.

Attached is a screenshot that shows the issue. The native menu from X11 at the top is rendered crisp, 1×1 pixel = 1×1 pixel on screen. The Inkscape window below is rendered with 1×1 pixel = 2×2 pixel on screen.

This basically means the Inkscape window on Retina Macs is using 25% of the available screen resolution. :(

[Moritz Moeller (virtualritz)]

I forgot, I am using Inkscape 0.48.2 r9819 on OS X 10.7.5.

[Moritz Moeller (virtualritz)]

I tried with the Inkscape 0.48.4 r9943 custom (0.48.4 RC5) package you posted on g.c.g.i.devel and the issue is also present there.

[Brion Vibber (brion)]

XQuartz (the X11 server for OS X ) doesn't support Retina/HiDPI resolution and, last I checked, has no plans to.

The best way to get native Retina/HiDPI support on OS X would be to build using GTK+ 3 using the native OS X backend instead of X11... however it's likely that HiDPI fixes will be needed before this works fully.

[Brion Vibber (brion)]

I went ahead a filed an issue for supporting GTK3 HiDPI mode, which should translate through to OSX in future: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1285887

[Qantas94Heavy (qantas94heavy)]

As this will be solved by GTK3 HiDPI fixes, closing as dupe of bug 1285887. Hopefully we should be seeing this with the native macOS app for Inkscape 1.0.

Closed by: https://gitlab.com/Qantas94Heavy