Improve Hi-DPI Scaling in Pencil2D

[Microraptors4Life]

The GUI/UI is very tiny for me on any version after "0.4.4b", however, I am using windows 10.

[Jose-Moreno]

@Microraptors4Life Do you have a resolution higher than 1080p? It seems Pencil2D might need to account for people with high resolution displays and HiPDI screens in the nearest future.

For now the only solution I can offer that isn't tied to changing the code is to attempt to follow the steps outlined in this guide under the "Fix Google Chrome (or Any Other Application)" section as this outlines how to turn off the global dpi scaling settings only for a specific application such as Pencil2D.

http://www.howtogeek.com/175664/how-to-make-the-windows-desktop-work-well-on-high-dpi-displays-and-fix-blurry-fonts/

If you'd like to test how to change the DPI resolution for your screen you can follow this guide here, but be cautious that following this will up-scale or down-scale everything you see, not just Pencil2D's interface and only Pencil2D's text will be up-scaled, not it's icons. Those will remain utterly tiny:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5990-dpi-scaling-level-displays-change-windows-10-a.html

Please leave this issue open and if you can please update the description info with your current resolution, graphics card model, screen model and if possible how much screen dpi you're using currently (you can erase all the template text you know).

For example I have a resolution of 1920x1080, an AMD Radeon HD 6770 graphics card, A Flatron E2240 LG Screen, and my current screen DPI is 96.

When I have some time I'll try to fill in a feature request to have Pencil2D icons scale properly with higher screen resolutions. Take care.

[Microraptors4Life]

Thank you for the suggestion and the attempt to help, I appreciate it :)

[Jose-Moreno]

@chchwy It seems we might need to make vector icons for Pencil2D and allow for HiDPI scaling, just users with high resolutions can work on Pencil2D correctly. Is it possible to make Pencil2D read svg icons, or would it require too much work?

If I were to edit the icons how do we plan for high res desktops? I assume it is better to downscale the icons than to up-scale them to avoid graphical artifacts.

I'll try to make a single SVG file with all the icons. It's time for Pencil2D to begin changing it's graphic design, even if it's just a tehcnical update

[scribblemaniac]

@Jose-Moreno Qt has a builtin SVG renderer, so it will take basically no work at all to display the svg icons. What will take some work is getting them to display at a reasonable size on all displays. Right now the sizes are hardcoded, which is probably the cause of this issue; they probably need to be based off of percentages or system font sizes or something like that. Since they're vectors you don't need to worry about downscale or upscaling. It would be much easier to integrate if you could make each icon as its own svg file.

It's time for Pencil2D to begin changing it's graphic design

👍 👍

[Jose-Moreno]

I'll be adding some recent forum threads of people with similar issues to help establish the priority of this request: https://www.pencil2d.org/forums/topic/pencil2d-on-surface-pro-3/ https://www.pencil2d.org/forums/topic/change-ui-size/ https://www.pencil2d.org/forums/topic/program-not-displaying-correctly-on-my-hdtv/

[Jose-Moreno]

@Microraptors4Life It's been a few years but it seems recently a new enhancement has been introduced to solve this problem, so would you mind testing this issue with our latest development build? http://pencil2d.org/download#nightlybuild

If that still doesn't work, let us know and meanwhile we have an actual workaround thanks to another user for Windows which might be applicable for your OS of choice through similar compatibility settings: https://www.pencil2d.org/doc/faq.html#i-have-a-hi-dpi-screen--high-resolution-desktop-but-the-text-in-pencil2d-is-all-wonky--icons-are-too-small

[gpsqueeek]

Hi @Jose-Moreno First things first, thanks for your hard work, I hope you enjoy it as much as you deserve ! I hope what I will describe corresponds to this bug, please tell me if I posted to the wrong place. I run Linux Manjaro (arch based) with XFCE on a FULLHD laptop. I tried the latest nightly (pencil2d-linux-2018-07-26.AppImage) : it runs but I still have the issue that the icons are too big and then I cannot see the timeline because the upper pannels need too much place and cannot be reduces. What I experimented with the stable (6.1.1) version, is that it seems to depend on the screen width but not necessarily height : 1600x900 had the too big icons while 1400x900 was perfect ; it might change the DPI depending on how it is calculated though (diagonally...?) I hope this helps !

[Jose-Moreno]

@gpsqueeek Hi. It's fine to post as a comment as long as it is related of course! normally if the issue is too extreme is better to create a separate thread, since your issue is related to manjaro, there was another issue where the user didn't see icons at all! so I guess there's progress :wink: I'll tag some of the developers that have been working on those linux cases to see what their input is. But it's probably better if you create a new Issue for your case considering you are using the latest version and using a linux distro. Thanks for reporting!

Devs Corner @scribblemaniac @J5lx If you don't mind could you take a look at this particular issue for comment https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/issues/597#issuecomment-408379993 considering it's using appimages and linux manjaro distro. When a new issue is opened for this I'll cross-reference the comment to avoid losing any discussion details. Thanks!

[gpsqueeek]

Thanks @Jose-Moreno :+1: I created a new issue : #1032

[Jose-Moreno]

[2020] Due to the amount of discussion in this thread, i'll keep it open as a blanket issue to record the Hi-DPI issue cases. The actual issue that's tracking Hi-DPI implementation is https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/issues/822 which will hopefully come at a later date.