Large Monitor DPI problem

Hi, I'm evaluating Nvil before I purchase and so far I'm loving it! I'm having a couple of issues though. I'm on Windows 8.1 and have a 32" monitor with 2560 X 1440 resolution. At that resolution most apps UI's appear miniscule, but you can change the windows scaling factor ( I set mine to 150% ) and that fixes it in most cases.

Nvil does not pay attention to the scaling factor and so is a "problem" app. Nvil's DPI and my monitors DPI are out of sync. What happens is that the text on buttons are distored and everything appears a little out of focus, it's like watching a You-Tube video at 360p. There is a way to get back the full resolution as follows: Exit Nvil. Right click on the Nvil icon and select properties, select the "Compatibility" tab, then check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings", click OK or Apply. After restarting Nvil everything is now much, much sharper.

Unfortunately since Nvil does not pay attention to the scaling factor other distortions occur. Luckily they are not too bad in Nvil, and should be relatively easy to fix. There are four main problem areas, in order of importance they are:

 1. The "Manipulation" tool bar on the bottom of the screen. The inner "frame" is too small. So some of the Icons are cut in half and so are the dropdown pick lists. And the checkbox description is truncated, and some other info/entry fields are off the screen. The outer tool bar can be resized but not the inner frame. The fix would be to make the frame where the control are displayed in, be taller and longer, or better yet re-sizeable.

 2. The right-click menu. Multi-lined lables run into each other and are cut off making it extremely hard to read. The containers that they are in are too small, both length wise and in height. The fix may be to have scalable container objects that hold the labels, or no containers at all just labels on inverted video.

 3. The SmartTips display in the left side panel. Text is cut off and runs into each other. The fix is to make the table container higher and longer or better yet re-sizable.

 4. The display font for the HUD is too small. The fix is to enlarge to font size by a couple of points or allow user selectable font size.

These changes could be toggled on and off in an .ini file, a formal UI is not necessary, but would be nice of course. In addition larger Icons would be really nice, but can be postponed till after the above fixes.

I'm sure that as larger monitors get cheaper and have higher resolutions more of your customers will experience this.

Here is a link describing the problem that some programs have with high DPI displays if they are not specifically designed to run on them:

http://www.kynosarges.org/WindowsDpi.html


Here is a MS link for creating high DPI apps:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...=vs.85%29.aspx

Thanks in advance for looking into this problem! Keep up the good work... it is very impressive!

Cleaner screen shot 1

More screen shots

and more...

Are all those images taken after  "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" checked?

Hi ISonia,
Thanks for responding.

Are all those images taken after  "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" checked?

Yes they are. I had to down rez the screen shots in order to comply with this forms image size limit, so they appear a bit fuzzier than they really are, but it gives you a good idea of how the text is overlapping and truncated.

I think the second post with the screen shot of the Manipulations Tool Bar is at the original resolution however.

I think they are done.

Wow! That was fast... Thank you so much! It is much better! The Manipulation Toolbar and the HUD (in the 30 DEC release) are just great!

A couple of things, in the 29 Dec release the Rotate object doesn't work, it is fixed in the 30 Dec release that is in the Bug reporting forum only. Also in the 30 Dec release, it is not possible to move an object with the manipulators half way above the grid, although it is possible to move it way below the grid. Not sure if that is also the case in the 29 Dec release.

About the screen DPI, although the SmartTips, and right click menus are easier to read because of your scaling font fixes since they are no longer truncated or run-ons, they are still a bit hard to read because they are so small on a large monitor when fitted into the containing table and frames. Would it be possible to also allow the scaling of these 2 containers? This should be separate from the font scaling. If this could be done by tweaking an existing XML file, just point me in the right direction.

Again thank you so much!!

...
A couple of things, in the 29 Dec release the Rotate object doesn't work, it is fixed in the 30 Dec release that is in the Bug reporting forum only. Also in the 30 Dec release, it is not possible to move an object with the manipulators half way above the grid, although it is possible to move it way below the grid. Not sure if that is also the case in the 29 Dec release.
...

I don't know you what you mean. A video or some pics would help.

OK it seems to be working fine now, must have been my error, don't know what I did though. What was happening was that I could move an object with the arrows manipulator gizmo along the X axis (red arrow) and Z axis (blue arrow) but it would not move up along the Y axis (green arrow). Attempting to do so would just not work, is there some way of constraining movement to certain planes?

As to the Rotate command for the 29 Dec release, I could Pan and Zoom, but Rotate would not work. The object would refuse to turn. I restarted the program several times with the same results. I just re-installed 29 Dec release and it is working fine now too.

Maybe it was a problem with how I installed update releases, which is overwriting / merging the updates instead of wiping and doing a clean install, which I will do from now on (I did not want to loose any customizations that I did, but now see they are not stored in the installation directory). Or it could have been an inadvertent right menu click, when I was not able to read the menu items properly. Sorry for the false alarm, I'll try to be more careful.

Thanks IStonia!

What was happening was that I could move an object with the arrows manipulator gizmo along the X axis (red arrow) and Z axis (blue arrow) but it would not move up along the Y axis (green arrow).

I have not seen problems like that.
You may of had "Grid" snap enabled?, so when moving in "Y" it will keep snapping back to grid.

Thanks Steve,

That was it. I'm very new to Nvil and have not seen this command in other apps I've used, but I see it on the right click menu, and that was exactly the behavior. Is there any option that would prevent object rotation?

The two scaling features are added.

Perfect! Thanks so much IStonia!!

Is there any option that would prevent object rotation?

No, not that I know of.


I see ISonia has added scaling for the smartTips(and radial menu). I just wanted to add (in case you have missed it).
For the "SmartTips", you can change the hight of the individual rows. If you "MMB(Middle Mouse Button) click" in the entry for the shortcut(of any row) in the SmartTips, the hight of that row will change between different sizes. You can also "MMB(keep pressed down) + drag" in that same area to increase/decrease the hight.