Ribbon Icons Blurring in 4K

[David_Robison]

I have a customer who recently changed to a 4K monitor. All the icons on the ribbons in my add-in were scaled up from their original size and look blurry. What's the proper way to handle icon scaling in ribbons? I looked in the CUI editor and didn't see anything obvious there.

[rkmcswain]

What version of AutoCAD?
Are all of the updates applied?
4k support was only recently added as an update for 2017.

More info:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Odd-gr...

[David_Robison]

AutoCAD 2018. I'll check that all the updates are installed.

We'll try the suggestions from that link and see if any help. My guess is that text scaling is causing the problem.

[pendean]

Get them to send you a full screen maximum resolution screenshot of the problem, if you are still stumped, share it with us so we can help figure it out.

[David_Robison]

Switching text size from 125% to 100% improved the situation (icons are smaller but no longer blurry).

I'm assuming there's no way to have large and clear icons.

[moogalm · Accepted solution]

Just in case for future readers a small FAQ on the subject of 4K monitors. Bottom line no action is required from Developers.

• Are the existing icons just scaled or are there different icons for high resolution displays?

Neither. We only have 2 sizes; Small (16x16) and Large (32x32). CUI icons are just scaled up by acad when the display scaling of OS is higher than 100%.

Naturally, an up-scaling on a bitmap results in a fuzzy appearance on the UI.

• Any different type (png) of icon necessary?

N/A. The Ribbon supports the same formats as it has always.

• Any additional resolution of the icons for 4K necessary for the different possible sizes in the ribbons (currently 16x16 and 32x32)?

if a developer tries to use a bmp/ico/png larger or smaller than 16/32 pixels in CUI, acad will stretch the image to 16/32, and then scale it up to match the current display setting

• What are the recommendations for the ADN developers? I did not find any information in the Object ARX help files.

No specific advice or work should be needed to support high resolution displays. 

Perhaps only just “use simple designs that scale without significant degradation”.