High Resolution Screen and xLights

[algerdes]

I've moved my xLights sequencing to a new computer.  Dell XPS 15 with one of those high resolution screen in a 17 inch package. The screen resolution of the laptop is 3840 x 2160.  I connect an external monitor to it with a resolution of 1920 x 1080. 

Working with xLights itself - the image is pretty easy to see.  (Sharper than all get out.)  The problem is any information boxes that pop up are so tiny that I cannot see them. (e.g., mouse over an effect and a popup shows the name of the effect.) Note this also happens on selection lists, etc.

Temporarily I've changed my resolution on the computer to 1920 x 1080 (same as the connected monitor - and the smallest this computer will do.)  Under this change the informational pop ups are a bit larger, but not by much.

Has anyone else had this problem, and if so how did you get it to work correctly.  As I get older, I find this small stuff to be "challenging".

[dkulp]

The HIDPI support in xLights on Windows is definitely "lacking", but that's partially due to the poor HIDPI support in wxWidgets.   It's a lot of work to get the HIDPI stuff working well on Windows.

It's currently working very well on the Retina based Mac's.   On the Mac, the only main thing that needs to be taken care of is the scaling factor on the bitmap images used in various locations.  (this could be done automatically as well if we used resource bundles instead of XPM's, but we need XPM's for Linux)   While it does require some extra coding, it's not a ton of places.  All of the "size" things for controls and drawing and such is automatically taken care of, nothing needs to be done.

On Windows, however, whenever we size a component, we would need to call the FromDIP methods to make sure the sizes are scaled.   What's worse, a lot of places where we'd need to do that is code generated from CodeBlocks which isn't something we can do.     There are discussions on the wxWidgets list about making this more automatic like it is for Mac (and Linux when using GTK3) for a future verison of wxWidgets.   Just not sure if it will end up going anywhere or not.

[algerdes]

Thanks for the explanation.  During "sequencing season"  (isn't that year round?) I'll leave my XPS-15 in the "low res mode".  At least I can see that a popup, help, etc. are on the screen.  It works somewhat, and there are much bigger things for you guys to be doing.

I wish my coding skills were up to par so that I could help. 

Thanks for all the work you and all the developers put into this.