Sound and display

[Erik Groothuijzen]

Finding my way around Linux Mint quite happily theses days and everything seems to work OK. Two issues that still bother me: One is the display and the other is the sound. The display settings give me 100% (too small) or 200% (too large) with nothing in between. Increasing the font does not increase the web page heading and the experimental increments on the setting tab doe not work very well. I would need only about 125 to 150%. Any suggestions.
The other is the sound volume on the laptop speakers (the earphones are fine) in some applications. The VLC app takes very good care of it and and a YouTube add on on Firefox allows you to double the sound, which works fine. Have found the ALSA mixer which improved matters somewhat but did not solve it entirely.

 

[osprey]

In relation to the "display", if you mean what you see when using a browser, then the sizing of what's on screen in the browser can be adjusted in 10% increments up or down by pressing the keys: cntl and +, or cntl and -, respectively. The cntl key needs to be held down for the + and the - presses.

These keystrokes are fairly common in browsers to change the size of what's appearing on screen, and work flawlessly in firefox, librewolf and brave on machines here. The browsers actually remember the size the user sets so if the user leaves a webpage which has been adjusted for size, the browser honours the setting when they return to that webpage. The percentage of size, if it's other than the default 100%, usually appears at the right hand end in the URL bar.

On the sound issue, if you haven't tried this, perhaps try setting the volumes to maximum in all the alsamixer volume bars. You can ensure that you cover them all by having pressed F5 to see them all. Then you can use the volume controls in the apps you use to adjust the volumes. That's one way it can work well if there's not another problem.

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

I am well aware of the ctrl+ and - settings, but as I have indicated, they do not increase the heading of the web page, the bit which shows you which tabs are open and your bookmarks bar, hence the requirement for the whole display to be enlarged. I wish someone could get the experimental increase to work properly as that would solve the problem neatly.

 

[osprey]

Alas, there appears to have been a terminological misunderstanding in relation to the meaning of "heading of the webpage". The webpages themselves certainly respond to resizing, and they usually have headings in them, but those, it is now clearer, is not what you meant. You appear to be actually referring to the menu bar and the bookmarks toolbar and the URL dialog box, which are structures of the browser and not the browsing content, the latter being the webpage which can indeed be resized as described in post #2 of which you mentioned you were well aware.

There are configurations in firefox that evidently can achieve that as described here:

i would like to increase the size of my address bar, tabs and toolbar | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support

support.mozilla.org

A more radical approach to changing the size of those elements of the browser would occur if you changed the resolution that the machine is set to use. If you are using X, then you can run, in a terminal, the command:

xrandr

and it will output the resolutions available with the current graphics hardware, and then you could try to set a resolution from the list that is lower which will increase the size of apps on screen, but the result may not be satisfactory to you, which you may discover if you take this route. Users with visual impairments have found this useful in my experience, but it's not a course normally taken in my neck of the woods where most of us have spectacles .

 

[Erik Groothuijzen]

I am glad spectacles work for you. In our part of the woods we have them as well. I have something that spectacles do not correct any more which makes small print difficult to read. Thanks for the advice anyway.