Arduino IDE menu bar text too big, cannot change it

[gotvm]

I'm having problems with my Arduino IDE installation. I installed Arduino IDE on my Elementary OS laptop and no matter what I do I can't get the menu bar text to shrink to a usable size (see Screenshot below).

I tried the only solution that pops up on Google while looking this issue up, since either nobody ever probably happened to have this problem or fixed it immediately. I tried scaling down the GUI and editor font via preferences.txt to no avail. Is there something else that can be done to fix this?

[er_name_not_found]

@gotvm

Elementary OS laptop

Elementary Tweaks in Launchpad
Fix your font choices and sizes.

[gotvm]

Is this a known working solution? It says in the disclaimer it works only with elementary 0.3 Freya, and I'm running elementary 6 Odin.

Anyway, still worth a try. I'll try as soon as I can, thanks

[er_name_not_found]

No, there are a few solutions this one is just the last one I used to help a student with a similar issue a while ago.
I apologize if it's dated.

[gotvm]

It says not to use with previous versions, it doesn't say anything about newer ones but the fact that it's discontinued. I'll definitely try that solution out

[er_name_not_found]

Just curious, how did you end up with Elementary OS?

[gotvm]

I wanted to go back to Linux in light of recent events with my computers that required one, but didn't want to settle for Ubuntu which I've worked with multiple times. Elementary OS looks fancy and feels quite responsive on my laptop so I settled for that.

[Dozie]

@gotvm take a look at https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4402771781522-How-to-change-IDE-text-font-settings

[gotvm]

I tried that but it only changes the script text size, not the menu bar.

[gotvm]

I tried tweaking the title bar text size in Pantheon Tweaks (formerly Elementary Tweaks) but that didn't do it. Is there something else that I need to change?

[atulsnj]

Here is the Solution that worked for me elementary OS 6:
Go to the arduino-1.8.XX folder and make a new file named fontsettings with the following content

style "small" {
        font_name = "Inter Sans 11"
}
class "GtkWidget" style "small"

and change the arduino script file by adding

export GTK2_RC_FILES=$GTK2_RC_FILES:"/usr/share/themes/Default/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc:$APPDIR/fontsettings"

to the file before the line

"$JAVA" "${JAVA_OPTIONS[@]}" processing.app.Base "$@"

the final arduino script will look like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

APPDIR="$(dirname -- "$(readlink -f -- "${0}")" )"

for LIB in \
    "$APPDIR"/java/lib/rt.jar \
    "$APPDIR"/java/lib/tools.jar \
    "$APPDIR"/lib/*.jar \
    ;
do
    CLASSPATH="${CLASSPATH}:${LIB}"
done
export CLASSPATH

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$APPDIR/lib${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

export PATH="${APPDIR}/java/bin:${PATH}"

export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=`echo $JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS | sed 's|-javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar||g'`

JAVA=java
if [ -x "$APPDIR/java/bin/java" ]; then
  JAVA=$APPDIR/java/bin/java
fi

# Collect options to java in an array, to properly handle whitespace in options
JAVA_OPTIONS=("-DAPP_DIR=$APPDIR")

# Only show the splash screen when no options are present
if [[ "$@" != *"--"* ]] ; then
	JAVA_OPTIONS+=("-splash:$APPDIR/lib/splash.png")
fi

export GTK2_RC_FILES=$GTK2_RC_FILES:"/usr/share/themes/Default/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc:$APPDIR/fontsettings"

"$JAVA" "${JAVA_OPTIONS[@]}" processing.app.Base "$@"

Hope this helps.

[gotvm]

I will keep this here in case the problem comes back, but I fixed it in a super simple way just a couple of days ago and forgot to post here.

I simply uninstalled the tar version from the Arduino website and installed it through snap. Although it's just Arduino 1.8.15 and not the latest (I think 1.8.16), it still works perfectly. I will keep this in mind if it comes back.

[jeroenregtien]

Thank you very much for this solution, however it doesn't work for me under eOS 6.1 and IDE 1.8.19. The error message I get on the export line is "not a valid identifier".

As mentioned by gotvm, a snap IDE installation works flawless for release 1.8.15, but this one is getting dated and I want to switch to 1.8.19

Appreciate your suggestions.

[toloque]

Thanks atulsnj it worked perfectly for me, currently I have elementary os 6.1 the latest version of arduino ide 1.8.19, I did the steps you mention above, thank you very much