I recently purchased a Dell XPS 15 which includes a high dpi 15" screen with a resolution of 3600x1800. I have very good eyes but to be realistically usable windows needs to be scaled using DPI scaling. I have mine set to 150%. This works well for the most part but is defiantly hit and miss with many applications. I was extremely disappointed to find that AutoCAD 2015 supports DPI scaling but the implementation is incomplete and inconsistent. The properties palette has a mix of odd font sizes, the CUI palette is unusable, layer manager is bad, etc.
I have tried many different options but finally found a temporary workaround that is used for adobe applications here:
http://www.danantonielli.com/adobe-app-scaling-on-high-dpi-displays-fix/
The same manifest files can be renamed and placed in the AutoCAD program folder to disable the poorly implemented dpi scaling. This will scale the entire interface uniformly which will result in some blurring of text and icons but it is usable.
I realize that this probably only affects a small amount of users at this time but many higher end laptops are now including these high resolution monitors as the only option. I hope that a fix for this will be coming in a service pack soon.
First, thank you for sharing the link that you posted here in discussion thread. That is great information and hopefully other users will be able to benefit from it.
As per the DPI scaling with AutoCAD, current versions of AutoCAD (and other Autodesk products) are optimized for display in monitors with a resolution under 2000. When working with high-resolution/high dpi monitor on Windows 8.1 you may find that menu text appears smaller than expected, or may text overlap each other in drop-down menus.
The development team is aware of this issue and will be looking at addressing this in a future update or product release.
In the meantime, here is one thing you can do.
Set your Windows Display to 150% or less and Screen Resolution to under 2000.
This information can also be found here on this Windows link as well.
Quentin Contreras
Technical Support Specialist
Thank you for your response.
I do not believe that changing the resolution of the display below the native resolution is an acceptable solution. This would mean that I would be constantly looking at a blurry screen just so that autocad can be usable. The workaround that I posted is a better solution since it results in only a blurry autocad interface when the rest of the software that I use daily handles the high resolution and scaling just fine. Adobe has been releasing updates for their current products to address this issue. Chrome beta now supports DPI scaling. Office 2013 has no issues.
I really hope that this can be addressed in an update and that I don't have to wait for the next release (or later). The majority of the interface looks good. The ribbon, menus, tabs, drawing window are all fine. Really I would be satisfied if I could just change the text of the properties palette as shown in the photo that I posted. But the only option I found to change text was for the command line.
I have this same machine, which I'm very impressed with, and this same issue which is disappointing. We are only going to see higher and higher resolutions, I hope Autodesk addresses this as soon as possible.
Changing the resolution and font scaling in Windows will break other applications and is a poor workaround IMHO. As well, at best it's not utilizing the hardware I just paid good money to enjoy.
Thanks to ppauerthd for posting his tip!!
In case anyone is still interested: there's a different temporary workaround for this UI design failure.
@baberb1984 wrote:
This looks to be an excellent solution, can you tell us what you put in the manifest file?
It's easy but it doesn't work as well as you expect. See contents of the attached archive.
thx for the heads up. so much for my ultra hd monitor. 6 months later and Autodesk has done nothing - that's poor.
Unbelievable.
This morning I have installed the 2016 version and none of these problems have been addressed. At this point it is simply inexcusable that a software package as expensive as autocad is not able to be updated to work properly on the latest hardware. Every other application that I own has been updated and looks great on my computer with the glaring exception of autocad. I maintain a subscription so that I can always use the latest version which I had hoped would address issues like this. What, if anything, has been improved in this version?
@pendean wrote:
The real fix needs to be at the OS level (for Windows) as there are no real standards among hardware manufacturers: maybe Windows 10 will implement a standard then Autodesk and other software vendors will follow.
It seems you know very little about programming UI. The issue described in this thread (and my original thread) has nothing to do with Windows UI guidelines at all. It's just some smartass at Autodesk dev. team desided to use different UI element as a reference. Make sure to check any 2014 (and earlier) AutoCAD product: it doesn't have this bug.
I don't have Win8, or a 4K display, but I also have to believe the problem is primarily with Autodesk rather than Microsoft. The feature scaling issue shown in the original post also exists with AutoCAD2015-2016 running on Win7. AutoCAD2014 and previous had no problem properly DPI scaling on Win7, so if the OS didn't change, then it must be something that Autodesk did.
@pendean wrote:
As an owner of a 4k equipped laptop, either ALL software vendors are being 'smartasses' as a group in some kind of cartel to put down the little guy, or there is more to it. Whomever is to blame and whomever has the fix, no one is implementing them.
I'm not willing to drop down to old software: there are other solutions than lowering display settings at the moment.
I'm not sure what software you are using that you are having issues with. As I stated in my original post from nearly 9 months ago, I don't have any problems with other software. The situation has only improved since then as developers have updated their software with the exception of autocad.
As related from the link to the workaround that I originally posted, applications report on startup to windows if they are DPI aware or not. If not, windows handles the scaling. This results in a fuzzy UI and text from uniformly scaling the entire layout but it works.
Autocad incorrectly reports to windows that it is DPI aware but it doesn't handle the scaling properly resulting in an almost unusable UI. The manifest file workaround overrides this and allows windows to handle the scaling.
First, autocad shouldn't require this workaround. It doesn't handle scaling on its own properly and so shouldn't report to windows that it can.
Second, I call this a workaround and not a fix because of the resulting fuzzy text and UI. That's something I am willing to accept from older applications that haven't been updated in a while but not from an application that just released a major version days ago and costs thousands of dollars.
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