solved - dialog window too large for my laptop display on ubuntu

Some dialog windows are taller than 768 pixels and so you cannot see or press the OK button at the bottom. My acer aspire laptop running ubuntu 14.04 LTS has a screen resolution of 1366x768 pixels and no amount of ALT-mouse1 would persuade the window from adobe acrobat to move.

The solution was to use xrandr to create a virtual sized desktop and scale it to the physical display. The command which worked for me is:-

xrandr --fb 1920x1080 --output eDP1 --mode 1366x768 --panning 1920x1080 --scale 1.4055x1.4062

This worked immediately and the effect is that applications now think my display is 1920x1080 but it is scaled vertically to fit the screen (I never got mouse panning to work). The magic scale factor 1.4055 is 1920/1366 and the factor 1.4062 is 1080/768.

running xrandr with no arguments will show you the name and properties of your current display. E.g. mine now shows:-

cwturner@bigdataacer:~/bin$ xrandr

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767

eDP1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm panning 1920x1080+0+0

   1366x768       60.0*+

   1360x768       59.8     60.0  

   1024x768       60.0  

   800x600        60.3     56.2  

   640x480        59.9  

VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

HDMI2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

cwturner@bigdataacer:~/bin$