Various glitches caused by dependence on X11's reported screen physical size. Desired: a user config option to ignore per-screen DPI.

[ei14]

I have two monitors of similar resolutions, but one of the two monitors is falsely reported by xrandr to be only 9 millimeters tall. X11 provides no method for the user to change the reported monitor size. It doesn't cause issues for any software I use, except Zathura.

Solution

All of these problems would be avoided if there was an option that could be added to the zathurarc to tell Zathura to disregard per-screen DPI and work with pixel sizes only, as opposed to "physical sizes."

Problems

Zoom levels

Zathura wants to keep zoom levels constant with respect to physical size. This means that every time I move a Zathura instance from the normal screen to the "9mm" monitor, the document becomes unreasonably zoomed-in. I needed to set zoom-min 1 in order to even zoom out to see a whole page at once. Once I zoom out and then move the document back to my other monitor, the document is unreasonably zoomed-out.

Excess CPU and memory usage

It appears the renderer has trouble determining the level of detail it needs to render. Sometimes, it appears the renderer starts to render a document at an unreasonably high resolution, which quickly accumulates several gigabytes of RAM and heats up my computer fans.

Stuck on zoom best-fit or zoom width

When doing zoom best-fit or zoom-width, the viewer can get stuck. Pressing + or - no longer has any effect, until the window is resized, at which point the viewer suddenly snaps to whatever zoom level it should have been due to the +/- button presses.

Find-in-document breaks scroll position

If I perform a search with the / key even once, then unfocus the application then return, Zathura scrolls all the way to the bottom of the document. For documents with thousands of pages, this is rather annoying. This will continue to happen every time I unfocus the application window, ever since I performed even a single search. This scroll-to-bottom behavior doesn't stop until I (1) resize the window then subsequently (2) make a change to the zoom level.

UI elements become misaligned or disappear completely

Sometimes things like the bottom bar, search bar, and warning messages will all begin to appear in the wrong position. Sometimes they are missing completely; I believe this is because they are appearing at a position which is completely off screen. The resize-zoom maneuver fixes this temporarily.

[sebastinas]

This will require somebody experiencing this issue to come up and test a patch.