{"id":1747,"date":"2017-01-07T16:40:03","date_gmt":"2017-01-07T15:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/?p=1747"},"modified":"2018-10-17T18:04:49","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T16:04:49","slug":"windows-display-scaling-blurring-legacy-programs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/?p=1747","title":{"rendered":"Windows display scaling blurring legacy programs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Windows display scaling is great for programs that support it. But certainly not for all.<\/p>\n

Especially legacy apps get blurred, so use integer only, if possible!<\/p>\n

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The problem is in the very nature of windows history, as it was coded for pixels, and not vectorization.<\/p>\n

It made perfect sense back then, to make things snappier. But does not work well on modern high DPI displays.<\/p>\n

Newer apps (that are coded correctly!!), can handle the scaling, and thus display their content nice and crisp.<\/p>\n

But even a standard C# forms app of newest Visual studio displays the problem per default as can be seen above, for non-integer scaling.
\nHOWEVER this is often quite easy to make a WinForm app Per Monitor DPI Aware<\/em><\/strong> in minutes!! See this post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here is a more complete example with the offered scaling on a QFHD\/UHD (3840 x 2160) monitor, from 100% to 350%.
\nClick to enlarge, and make sure you browser shows the 1520 x 920 in 100% (and you see it on an unscaled display) to see the problem.<\/p>\n

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You will note that each windows title-line is scaled correctly by Windows for all, but the interior of the form looks horribly blurry for all but the integer (100, 200 & 300%) ones.
\nFor the integer ones each pixel is scaled to 2×2 or 3×3, and this leaves a sharp though pixelated picture that looks exactly as it would on a coarser monitor.
\nThat is if you scale a QFHD\/UHD (3840 x 2160) monitor to 300%, the image would look exactly identical to a HD (1280 x 720)\u00a0 monitor of the same size.
\nAnd if to 200 exactly like FHD monnitor of the same size.<\/p>\n

True DPI-aware apps would still look much better than even the integer scaled ones. (click to enlarge, to see how much sharper the text is)<\/p>\n

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Apart from that, scaling used with multiple monitor with different scaling, has some odd issues when you move a window, as the WHOLE window is scaled by the factor of the screen where the majority of the window currently is. This is not a big issue, as you seldom want a program-windows to span multiple monitors, especially if they are not more or less identical.<\/p>\n

Have a look at these two [click to enlarge to see the real difference], where I have moved the app a bit down (marked the imaginary border by a thin red line), and from being clear and crisp, the font is now woolly as the app gets scaled.<\/p>\n

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I have a 40″ QFHD (111DPI) monitor behind and above my 14″ QHD (210DPI) laptop (Thinkpad X1 Yoga<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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With the secondary monitor roughly 1.5 times as far away from my eyes as the laptop, 125% is pretty close to making things having the same ‘apparent size’ (the angle), since (100%\/111dpi) \/ (125%\/210dpi)=1.51<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Windows display scaling is great for programs that support it. But certainly not for all. Especially legacy apps get blurred, so use integer only, if possible!  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc-and-code-samples"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2636,"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions\/2636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eskerahn.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}