How do you handle control size on touchscreen, so it is easily used?
I have seen most examples have TextBox Height set to 40 pixels, or buttons 40x40. So, when I make controls this size and use it on my 13" Full HD device. it is OK.
However, I have noticed that lately there are laptops with very high resolution (ex 3200x1800), and small screens (ex 13-14"). How do you handle such scenarios? They usually set text (app) size to 250% in display settings, although this is mandatory.
Do we programmers need to use text (control) scaling as parameter when building UI?
Writing a DPI–aware application is the key to making a UI look consistently good across a wide variety of high-DPI display settings. Applications that are not DPI–aware but are running on a high-DPI display setting can suffer from many visual artifacts, including incorrect scaling of UI elements, clipped text, and blurry images.
link: Writing DPI-Aware apps
Related
I have an application which uses three UI frameworks:
OWL
Windows Forms
WPF
The WinForms and WPF forms and dialogs use fonts that are noticeably smaller than the OWL fonts.
If I use DPI scaling (to 125%) in Windows 10, it does a very good job of upscaling a Windows Forms dialog. If I use Scale on a Windows Form it only scales the controls and not the fonts. If I use the functions suggested here:
https://github.com/Microsoft/WPF-Samples/blob/master/PerMonitorDPI/WinFormsHost/MainWindow.xaml.cs
I get scaled controls but not fonts if I only use the form scaling. If I use the extra font scaling functions, that increases the size of the dialog way beyond the original desired scaling (from 1.25 to 1.6 roughly).
Does anyone know how to scale a WinForms form properly like Windows 10 seems to be able to (without changing screen DPI setting to 125%)?
The answer is to place everything in a flow layout or a table layout. Then spend time figuring out how to make sure they layout correctly.
A better answer would be WPF but that's not always an answer.
I am having an issue with auto scaling while trying to create a Windows forms app. I'm currently running on a Dell laptop with a 3840 x 2160 display (4K). I'm trying to add an image to a picture box, and if I leave the picture at its native size (which is quite small on my display) it appears at a correct autosized scale when I go to run the app. The issue with this is at the native picture's size it is very difficult to lay out all the other items I want to add to the app. If I increase the size of the picture to something that is usable it increase the size of the image to something large enough it doesn't fit on my screen. I know this is likely due to the auto scaling Windows 10 does, but I wanted to see if anyone else might have a work around for this? I've tried to see if there is a way to zoom in the display in the designer window, but I haven't found anything. I have also noticed the size of the windows forms app itself changes depending on where I have items placed on it.
I don't know that I completely understand what you're asking, but I would assume it could have something to do with the pixel units of your elements. Here's an excellent explanation of point-based vs pixel-based sizing
I have a mobile game developed by U3D and NGUI and targeted to platforms such as android and IOS, but there are so many mobile resolutions and aspect ratios change from 1.3 to event 2. My UI are designed under resolution 1136x640, and UIRoot Scaling style is FixedSize, Manual Height is 640.
I am not going to use anchors in NGUI widgets because distance is defined in pixels but not in percentages, when resolutions are changed, relative position of widgets are also changed, this is not what I want.
I refer this but still have no idea to handle this tricky problem perfectly, I need some suggestions on how to use NGUI in right way to handle different mobile resolutions.
The newest (3.x.x) NGUI allows you to use their new anchoring system. As you said, it is specified in pixels, however you can specify different targets and distances to different edges, and it will behave similarly to percentages.
Are you familiar with NGUI team videos explaining their new releases?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k5iIzKTEBQ
Some of the information there could be helpful, and playing with Custom settings of anchors either.
Another useful things is to create scaling script attached to root, which scales all elements down, basing on the detected dpi. If your UI is prepared for phones, you probably won't need all the buttons to take the same percent of the screen on tablets.
With my current monitor I prefer a DPI setting of 120 pixels per inch (which windows suggests as the default). However, after designing a form, it often lays out incorrectly on systems that don't use 120 pixels per inch.
I'm wondering, is it necessary that I should set my display settings to 96 pixels per inch for whenever I use the designer?
Also, there are some problems when other developers have different DPIs. They open a form in the designer and move something like a text edit control, and suddenly find that it automatically resizes itself too. Then, there's one control that's a different size to the others and we're in a mess.
P.S. I've read related posts. They're all interesting, but didn't answer my question.
How to control the font DPI in .NET WinForms app
C# WinForms disable DPI scaling
WinForms Different DPI Layouts
DPI not scaling properly
Visual Studio and DPI issue
No. You don't need to always have the DPI set to 96 when using the WinForms designer.
If you set the AutoScaleMode property to Dpi then the designer will write the current system DPI into the designer.cs file in the AutoScaleDimensions property for the form. When the designer is used on a system with a different DPI, this information will be used to rescale the form and the designer can be used at a different DPI.
When I tried other scaling modes, this didn't seem to work well. 'None' meant that controls wouldn't scale at runtime, 'Font' seemed to suffer from rounding errors and when the display settings DPI changed, the control sizes could change slightly causing errors.
I also found that for UserControls that are added to forms it is best to set their AutoScaleMode to Inherit. If you use Dpi, then the controls on it get re-scaled twice and will end up being laid out incorrectly.
I came up with the guidelines above after a few hours of experimentation and internet searching where I found the following two articles:
Automatic scaling in Windows Forms
and:
Child controls on a UserControl may get clipped in a system with a lower Font Dpi
I don't think setting your dpi to a different value permanently will help you. The problem is that there are problems when you change the dpi, i.e. the form layout you have isn't able to deal with different dpi's.
I don't have an absolute solution for you, except that you should test with different dpis and see if it produces problems with the form display. It isn't hard to work out what causes problems and you'll learn what to avoid fairly quickly.
I created a simple web browser WPF test application with pictures and text within a canvas, with windows set at 96dpi.
Then I switched to 120 dpi and :-((( Display is messy, image size changed and part of the canvas is out of view...
When I used Winforms, I set the AutoScaleMode property to None and the windows keeps its size, the controls as well, the controls which have inherited font are properly displayed, not blurry and not too big...
What can I do to mimic this (good) behavior in W¨F?
I'm not clear on what you mean by "web browser WPF ... application". WPF doesn't run in a Web browser, unless you're talking about an XBAP. Or are you doing Silverlight? Or is it just a WPF navigation application and not browser-based at all? You'll need to clarify.
WPF automatically scales your content when you run in high-DPI modes. This is intended behavior: if the user explicitly says they want everything to be bigger on the screen, then WPF will respect the user's wishes. The old WinForms hacks of "pretend high-DPI doesn't exist, just show everything at the normal small size and hope it doesn't piss the user off too much" aren't available in WPF; you could probably emulate them if you worked at it, but you're steered very strongly toward doing the Right Thing.
WPF scales everything, so your statement that "part of the canvas is out of view" doesn't make sense. It should be scaling the canvas, its parent window, and its child elements all by the same amount, so if everything fits at 96dpi, it should also fit at 120dpi and 144dpi. If not, then you're doing something strange and you'll have to provide a code sample that reproduces the problem.
You seem to be claiming that fonts are blurry when you run in a high-DPI mode, which sounds very strange. Fonts are rendered as vectors, so they should scale cleanly, and render crisply even in high-DPI modes. I've never seen the blurry fonts you describe, so again, you'll have to provide a repro case.
The only thing that I would expect to be blurry are images. If you're using raster (bitmap) images (BMP / GIF / JPG / PNG) in your UI -- for example, for the icons on a toolbar -- then yes, those will look pretty bad when they're scaled. It pretty much always looks bad when you take a small bitmap and make it larger. You might try working around this by using larger images and sizing them down for display -- for example, if you want your toolbar images to be 16x16 (when in standard 96-dpi mode), then you could try putting a 32x32 bitmap in your project, setting the Image element's Width="16" and Height="16" in your XAML, and seeing if that looks any better. It would actually be 20x20 physical pixels in 120dpi mode, and 24x24 in 144dpi mode, both of which would still be scaled down from the 32x32 resource and would therefore have a better shot of looking good than a 16x16 source image that's had to be scaled up. (I haven't tried this technique in a WPF toolbar, though, so I don't know how well it would really work in practice with typical toolbar images.)
The very best way to get around the problems with scaling images would be to use vector images instead of raster. Unfortunately, it's hard to find libraries of vector images. They're few, far between, typically less comprehensive than what you can find for bitmap images, and often expensive.
Presumably you use fixed length units (px). Try re-layouting your project keeping the WPF layout rules in mind. This page has some best practices for that.
I just found a bug using MaxHeight under WPF in .NET 4, set in a Style that gets inherited by another Style and that is used as a StaticResource, which didn't get influenced by the DPI set by the user. I set it from MaxHeight to Height, then it got influenced by the DPI. I suspect a bug in the .NET 4 (and possibly other frameworks) here.