How do you run Mathematica on a High DPI screen at full resolution, such as on the surface book 2, or a 4K laptop screen? I've tried setting the QT_SCALE_FACTOR variable, but that made the top menu bar much larger than it should be. I also tried setting the notebook magnification, although that caused problems with the formatting of the notebook and prevents images but displaying at full resolution.


There are a few different ways to solve this problem: setting the QT scale factor for the entire application, increasing the notebook magnification (both of these were suggested here), and setting the Screen DPI.

The most obvious solution - increasing the notebook magnification - runs into issues because things like images display at a lower resolution than the screen resolution.

suffers from the same problem of reduced resolution for things like images and graphics. To get things to display at a reasonable size, increase the DPI used to render fonts:

SetOptions[$FrontEndSession, FontProperties -> {"ScreenResolution" -> 144}]

Or to set it permanently:

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, FontProperties -> {"ScreenResolution" -> 144}]

Where "ScreenResolution" should be set to the desired DPI. (The default DPI is 72, so to scale things up by 2x set it to 144).

This increases the size of the notebook text, text in graphics, and the bar displayed under evaluated expressions, as well as the resolution of any help pages.


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