SGP UI Sometimes Acts Funny on High DPI Displays (Windows's Fault)

General
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Hi, everybody.

I’m using SGP 3.0.2.82 on an AlienWare laptop with a high DPI display. I also have an external monitor, that isn’t terribly high DPI, connected at the same time. Ordinarily I like to have SGP with the modules I use docked suitably on one screen, and then divide the other screen between TheSkyX, PHD, and a command prompt window tailing SGP’s logs.

I’ve noticed a few quirks since moving to the high DPI and multi-monitor configuration, including:

  • Sometimes the dockable UI modules, when SGP is on the high DPI screen, will appear as minuscule, postage stamp sized, almost unreadable slivers. They’re not getting scaled up to compensate for the much higher actual physical resolution of the display. If you carefully click on the title bar of one, it will sometimes redraw itself and grow to a usable size.
  • Sometimes UI elements such as dropdown lists will appear at a fraction of their size, as above, but also nowhere near the UI control that they should be physically attached to. I haven’t found a way to make those usable yet.
  • Sometimes the dockable modules will refuse to volunteer to dock when taken near the edges of the SGP main window that they’d normally stick to.

I fiddled a bit with the display settings in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and tried each of the options of letting the Application, the System, or the System (in some kind of not especially well described Fancier Mode) handle compensating for high DPI things, but none of them seemed to produce entirely happy results.

It appears the state of affairs for high DPI displays on Windows is perhaps not all one would like it to be at present. The following links shed some light on the roots of the problem. The second one in particular is interesting in the tale of nearly undreamable hideousness it recounts:

The situation seems to be exacerbated by having a second, external monitor whose DPI is considerably different from the laptop’s native display, as one might expect from reading some of the stuff above. If an application has windows on each of the two monitors, it can get pretty confused. If you drag a window between monitors, hilarity sometimes ensues with it radically changing size and becoming either cartoonishly large or sadistically puny.

All that said, my question would be whether there are any recommendations for getting current versions of SGP to behave as well as possible given the sort of sub-optimal state of Windows’s ability to deal with situations like these… or is it possible that such configurations are rare enough in practice that others in the user community haven’t run across them yet?

Given the Homeric epic of getting Notepad to handle these scenarios gracefully that was described in one of the links above, I sort of hope that this stuff doesn’t create irritating non-astro-feature work for SGP…

Best,
Jerry