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Author Topic: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens  (Read 9060 times)

naveed

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CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« on: July 29, 2015, 07:05 PM »
I just installed CHS on my Sony FIT 15A which has a screen resolution of 2880x1620. I have the scaling set to 150%. I'm running Windows 10, but I suspect that this is not a Windows 10 issue, but a DPI one. The options dialog is too miniscule to read.

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mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2015, 07:35 PM »
yep, let me see what i can do about this -- i think i can fix it.
it's come up on another of my apps as well (FARR was it?)

naveed

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2015, 07:38 PM »
Probably so - I'm guessing they share a good part of the code.

tomos

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #3 on: July 30, 2015, 03:39 PM »
mouser I've even been having problems with a FHD 15.6" screen (1920 x 1080).
I have the text @ 125%

Screenshot Captor:
in options, it look like the text is not enlarged.
In the main window, the menu text is correct, but the icons look miniscule, and the text at the top of the viewer pane is cropped (Autofit, etc.)

In FARR's options, the text looks enlarged but there are multiple places where text is cut off or overlapping.
I havent added my lisence yet on this machine, and the popups (on windows start) also have overlapping text (yet the text looks too small to read - will try remember to get a snap when I reboot).

Screenshot - 2015-07-05 , 22_23_24.png
Tom

xtabber

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #4 on: September 13, 2015, 12:16 PM »
I'm looking for a clip manager right now and just tried CHS.  This is definitely a problem that would have to be fixed before I could use CHS - it is completely unreadable on my 2560x1440 27" monitor.

See screenshot:Screenshot - 9_13_2015 , 1_00_22 PM.jpgCHS is unusable on High DPI Screens

This screenshot was taken with Screenshot Captor, which is somewhat hard to read, but nowhere near as bad as CHS.  In particular, the SC options screens seem to use slight larger fonts than for those in CHS. Note also that the title bar for the Memo pane in the CHS main windows is not wide enough to fully display the system font which is set at 150%.

mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #5 on: September 13, 2015, 01:34 PM »
Ill see if i can't fix the CHS font issues on high-dpi screens asap.

mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #6 on: September 13, 2015, 03:01 PM »

xtabber

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #7 on: September 13, 2015, 05:00 PM »
Wow!  That's a really FAST response!

Two improvements noted in the beta:

1) Text in the options box is marginally larger. Still too small for comfort, but at least readable.

2) The title bar for the memo pane now fits the text without cropping the bottom.

It's a little hard to test because as far as I can tell, I can't have multiple instances to look at side by side.  I won't be able to test screen fonts again until next weekend as I will be away from home until then and my laptop screen is pretty low res.

mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #8 on: September 13, 2015, 05:57 PM »
Good to hear it's better.  :up:

bott3322

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #9 on: January 05, 2016, 03:59 PM »
Please try the new beta:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=1514.0

I'm experiencing similar high-DPI issues with CHS v2.34.0 using Windows 10 on a Lenovo Yoga 900 (3200 x 1800) laptop. This is my first experience with both Win10 and high-dpi resolutions, so I'm a novice.

In latest version CHS, the system tray right-click menu text is too crowded vertically, though font size is appropriate.

All icons in the Main Window are tiny. Main Window Tree text is tiny. Grid and Memo main window text is tiny. The Grid window's "Quick Search Filter" text is sized perfectly, as is all text in the Memo window's header fields. So, CHS text size varies from usable to unusable depending on the field.

Is the beta fix referenced above included in CHS v2.34.0 release?
If so, any other suggestions for making all fonts proportionally sized, and icons larger?

Here are screen captures of the right-click system-tray menu, and Main Window:
CHS_Rt_Clk_Menu.jpgCHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
CHS_Main_Window.jpgCHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Last Edit: January 06, 2016, 11:04 AM by bott3322 »

mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #10 on: January 05, 2016, 06:05 PM »
Could I see a screenshot?

bott3322

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #11 on: January 06, 2016, 11:05 AM »
Mouser, I attached them to my original post. Thanks for the help.

IainB

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #12 on: January 06, 2016, 04:25 PM »
This probably needs to be recognised and accepted as a general problem attributable to changing technology in modern display devices.
I use CHS a great deal and I have found and mentioned before on this forum the ergonomic issue that the fonts on the Options pane are become almost too minuscule to read - and this is very probably aggravated by the glary white backgrounds on which any text appears.
Today I noticed that the problem seemed even worse when trying to read the text in a CHS Quick Note, where it seems the minuscule characters are drawn with 1 pixel-wide lines. Similarly, this is probably aggravated by the glary white background on which the text appears.

I think this problem is common to CHS, FARR, Screenshot Captor and possibly others where a common approach may have probably been used to display the Options and some other windows.
Fortunately, in CHS at least one is able to make the proggy more ergonomically usable (for which I am grateful as I use it a lot) - for the majority of the time at any rate. That is because one is able to adjust fonts and the colours of backgrounds in the main GUI - that is, the 3 panes integrated in the main CHS clip management display.

It has to be said that, ergonomically, one of the worst possible combinations for eye-strain and perceptual confusion has long been shown to be black print on a white background (sorry, Gutenberg), and when the characters become smaller (as they tend to do on higher resolution displays under Win8/10) and the background is emitting a more glary white light (as it tends to do on higher resolution displays under Win8/10), the net effect is to necessarily make any on-screen object more difficult to perceive clearly and without distortion, and especially printed text. The speed of perception is also reduced as the visual perception areas of the brain struggle to make sense of the unclear images being received from the eyes' retinae.

These are old hat ergonomic conclusions from wartime and post-war research and perceptual studies - not recently-discovered surprises - and they were rapidly pressed into action in defence (e.g., aircraft recognition) and paved the way for the design for a lot of important aircraft cockpit and other instrumentation design (e.g., including airport flight monitoring and ship radar displays), and later the design of AA road-signs in the UK, and some up-market UK automobile dashboard instrumentation displays, and Control Data and IBM CAD/CAM dual-screen workstation graphical displays and pen tablet systems in the late '70's and early '80s.

mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #13 on: January 06, 2016, 04:37 PM »
Let me see what I can do.

mouser

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #14 on: January 07, 2016, 07:48 PM »
Can you try this beta version:


It should look differently when you first run it (i've set it in manifest to indicate that it is not dpi aware).

NOTES:
  • You should turn off any custom font settings you may have set in the app to see how it will look out of the box.
  • Additionally, you will find a new option on the "startup" tab of options, that will let you force the program to tell windows that it IS dpi aware (default in previous version) -- that should let you go back to how it was.  Changing the setting requires app restart.




Let me know!

bott3322

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #15 on: January 07, 2016, 09:39 PM »
Mouser, your changes are working well for me, both on the right-click menu and the Main Window fields.
Nice job!

Thanks!

IainB

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens
« Reply #16 on: January 08, 2016, 06:50 AM »
Sadlement, there's not much difference here...it's a negligible difference, at best.
Worth a try anyway. Good idea to have the DPI_aware toggle.

IainB

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Re: CHS is unusable on High DPI Screens - CHS workaround.
« Reply #17 on: August 22, 2016, 06:08 AM »