Many new Windows laptops are coming out with high resolution, or high dot per inch (HiDPI), displays. For example, the 2015 Microsoft Surface Book has a 13.5" display with 3000x2000 pixels.The goal of these HiDPI displays isn't to make everything tiny on your screen, but instead to make normal sized graphical elements crisper and smoother to look at. The way Microsoft Windows handles this is to scale up the applications you run. For example, the default configuration of the Surface Book mentioned above uses a 200% scaling factor for everything that is displayed.
Not all applications respond well when scaled, however. The application framework that APDM's software products are based on (the Eclipse framework) currently does not support this type of scaling very well. This results in negative side effects, such as tiny icons in the toolbar, graphical elements not fitting correctly within dialog boxes, and more.
Support for HiDPI displays is scheduled to come to the Eclipse framework mid-2016, and we will work to bring this support to our products as quickly as we can. In the meantime, there are two workarounds to get your APDM software products working well on your HiDPI display.
- The first option is to change the display scaling in Windows to 100%. Search for "scaling" or "display" in the search field to open the correct configuration tool. The downside to this is that you will now have smaller text and graphics. Depending on your resolution, this may be acceptible. If not, you can change the display resolution (probably through the same configuration tool) to a lower setting. For example, the best option for the Surface Book discussed here is a resolution of 1920x1200. The downside of lowering the resolution is that it results in text that is not as smooth or clear. This approach also affects all applications and your whole Windows experience.
- The second option is to explicitly tell Windows that our application does not support HiDPI displays, which forces it to display in a lower resolution and without scaling. The downside to this approach is that it requires administrator access to change a Windows registry setting and to copy a file to your installation. The upside, relative to option 1), is that your Windows experience and all other applications are rendered at high resolution. To take this approach, do the following:
- Download the two files attached to this forum topic (hidpi.reg & javaw.exe.manifest).
- Go to your Downloads directory and double click on the hidpi.reg file. You will need to have administrator priviledges on your computer and it will prompt you to make a modification to your registry. You will receive some warnings, but click through them.
- Copy the javaw.exe.manifest file to the following location: [installation_directory]/jre8/bin
- Relaunch the application, and you should be good to go.
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