From: Scott Palmer
On 1/22/07, Bob Arnson < [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >
wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
Ok, I should have clarified that I have read that bit
of the tutorial many times and it doesn't help a lot. In particular:
- the two systems that are displaying it
differently have the same font size, different screen resolutions (1280x1024 vs
1152x864) but the same pixels-per-inch settings. And strangely, the installer
box appears physically larger on the smaller screen (that is, the box is a
greater number of pixels across on the 1152-wide display than it is on the
1280-wide display – quite a few more).
- The bitmaps I'm using more or less conform
to the specifications. There are big letters which are part of the logo, and
it's a pain if we can't use that. No dithering or chequered backgrounds.
Resolution and DPI aren't directly related to MSI dialog
scaling. It's not documented, but from experimenting, it appears that MSI uses
the message box font to determine when it thinks it needs to scale dialogs.
Typical XP themes all look the same with the same DPI setting but custom
themes, customized fonts, or non-English fonts all can cause scaling. There's
really nothing you can do to avoid it using MSI UI; even Win32 UI suffers from
the same problem though it's more predictable (based on DPI) and most folks
running high DPI are used to minor artifacts because of scaling.
It also appears that MSI is using a broken algorithm to scale the
image. The result is spectacularly ugly, with streaks of color where it has
duplicated a row or column of pixels. Not realizing that the size was not
fixed (since the documentation indicates otherwise), I spent time tweaking my
images so they didn't scale on my development computer because the scaling
totally ruined the images... (I should have known something was up because the
image sizes I needed didn't match the docs). Now what am I supposed to do?
The purple streaks through the image that appear when scaling are totally
unacceptable.
I'm using JPEGs for my images, and know almost nothing about image manipulation
and GUIs. Here's my experience, for what it's worth. I was also having problems
with ugly scaling artifacts. The way I got round this was to pick a 'typical'
screen resolution and font size, and measure the exact size in pixels at which
my image was being drawn by MSI on that setup. I then recreated my image at
exactly that pixel size and incorporated it. It was obviously then drawn
perfectly in that configuration (since there was no scaling at all) but I find
it now also scales cleanly to all the other screen resolutions and font sizes
which I've tried (albeit not an exhaustive list - I was pleased enough getting
it to work well in the common cases). I don't know if I've just been lucky, but
previously I was seeing all sorts of ugly striping effects and false colours,
whereas now it's near perfect in every screen config I've used.
I believe that MSI's scaling is documented, unless I misunderstand what's being
talked about. Sizes of controls are specified in 'Installer Units' which are
"approximately equal to one-twelfth (1/12) the height of the 10-point MS Sans
Serif font size" - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa369490.aspx
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