Going to 120 dpi Messes Up Window Structure--Text and Some Text Functions In A Window Are Often Trun

[Susan]

One has been able to change the character dpi for a long time. Now that
screen resolution has grown so much higher--my laptop native resolution now
is 1920 x 1200--my desire to use 120 (up from 96 dpi) has grown. But on
experimenting with this I've discovered that along with the larger text size
the window layout this text must fit in does not adjust for this increased
size--text gets truncated and even lost. I have one application where so
much was lost that the 'cancel' and 'okay' boxes were missing. I only
yesterday discovered that by changing back to 96 dpi all was well once
again. Of course at 96 dpi all application text size is pretty small if I
continue to use 1920 x 1200.

The questions are whether--while continuing to use 1920 x 1200--there might
be some other way of fixing this problem while using 120 dpi? Thank you.

 

[Chuck]

Some laptops and displays may have an alternative. There are also windows
"accessibility" features, and "virtual" screen utilities. (the video data
screen is larger than the display screen) These display part of the screen
and have a "convenient" way to scroll to other parts. (I've used these in
the past to deal with large spreadsheets.
First, there are a lot of apps that don't do well at other than 96 dpi.
Many are still setup for 1024x768, and really old ones may expect 800x600,
and possibly 72dpi
The laptops and display/video cards I'm referring to have a utility that
allows a "fit to screen" or scaling mode that may or may not help.
Scaling has a price to pay in that it usually slows down the video response.

Part of the problem has to do with windows and "older" functionality that is
still supported, and still used by the apps.

 

[Susan]

Appreciate the effort and explanation here but I think for me it only proves
out the complexity of this issue and that I'm much better off keeping the
dpi at 96 until the whole industry does something about it.

 

[Eric Tiberius Duckman]

Appreciate the effort and explanation here but I think for me it only proves
out the complexity of this issue and that I'm much better off keeping the
dpi at 96 until the whole industry does something about it.

Checking "Disable display scaling on high dpi settings" on the
"Compatibility" tab for the properties of an executable can sometimes
help. http://tinyurl.com/5tp2zx

 

[DanS]

Appreciate the effort and explanation here but I think for me it only
proves out the complexity of this issue and that I'm much better off
keeping the dpi at 96 until the whole industry does something about
it.

Susan, it's not that complex at all.

It has nothing to do with old functionality or anything like that. When
you increase the DPI to make fonts larger, it affect the fonts, and not
the controls that use the fonts, like a text box, or a listview. To
support different DPI's, the developer would need to compensate in the
programming to adjust the display sizes of those controls. And most
don't. It's just incomplete programming. Just like programs that put an
icon on the system, and then Explorer craches, but when it comes back,
some of the system tray icons may be missing. The developer is not
accounting for the fact that Explorer may crash, as it is Explorer.exe
that provides the system tray. All runnning programs are notified that
the new System Tray has started, and when that happens, an app that
displays a System Tray icon is supposed to add it there again. But a lot
of programmers don't.

You may be best with leaving it at 96 DPI. You can then increase the size
of the window elements to your liking.

Right-click the desktop and pick Personalize. Select Window Color and
Appearance. In the Appearance settings dialog, select 'Advanced'. In the
Adnvanced dialog, there's a drop down box to select the window element
you want to change.

For example, if after setting your highest resolution, the icons on the
desktop and text is too small, you can select 'Icons' in the drop down
list, and increase the size, and below the size is the font setting. You
can increase the font size here as well so when the changes are applied.,
the cons on the desktop will be larger, and have bigger fonts for their
labels.

You'd need to change a few thing's, like menu size & font, title bar size
& font, and maybe 'Message Text'. The 'Caption Button' size limits the
minimum size you can set the title bar to. Oddly enough, the 'Caption
Button' also dictates the height of the system tray icons. All of these
are in the drop-down boxes.

After adjusting the system, any apps that are used in which the fonts
seem small, I'd look thru their options and see if you can choose font
sizes in there.

It may be a bit tedious, but everything will display properly.