VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 18 2021 - 10:10:19 CDT

No, the fonts and widgets are all specified in fixed-size pixel units, this is why the
underlying GUI frameworks have to provide high-DPI support natively. The solution
taken by Apple with their "retina" displays is what the other OS/hardware vendors should
have also adopted. Apple's solution is to detect "old" existing apps that are not
intrinsically high-DPI ready, and it doubles the size of their fonts and GUI widgets
silently and automatically. Apps that are "retina aware" can choose to maintain full
control of their behavior, or get automatically scaled-up as other apps do. If we had
the same scheme available in Microsoft Windows and X-Windows, it would have been a much
smoother transition. In any case, the new versions of FLTK and Tk are working on
implementing the missing capabilities to abstract or directly support high-DPI screens,
and once they're stable, VMD will make use of them.

Best,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 07:21:13AM -0500, yjcoshc wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Is that possible to provide some options to adjust the size of UI
> font as a workaround?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Haochuan Chen
>
>
> On 9/17/21 23:58, John Stone wrote:
> >Hi,
> > This issue has been discussed previously. VMD depends on the underlying
> >FLTK and Tk graphical interface toolkits for rendering of all of the GUI
> >widgets. Preliminary support for high-DPI displays exists for MacOS X
> >in both of these toolkits, but high-DPI support is still ongoing work on
> >Unix/Linux X-Windows and Microsoft Windows platforms last I checked several
> >months ago. I will continue to revisit this issue, and as soon as there
> >appears to be a viable FLTK+Tk combination that works on the other non-MacOS
> >platforms, I will be happy to make test builds of VMD available with
> >high-DPI support on these platforms. As soon as I have something I can
> >share, I will let VMD-L know.
> >
> >Best regards,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> >On Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 01:45:22PM -0400, Dow Hurst wrote:
> >> I'm using the current 1.9.4 alpha and the fonts are still very small
> >> without adjusting using HiDPI methods. Reading or computer glasses can
> >> also be very helpful if you want to keep the resolution but see the tiny
> >> fonts.
> >> Dow
> >> On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 2:00 AM Yujie Wu <[1]yujie.wu_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> This is just the old problem: VMD fonts on the GUI are way too small
> >> when displayed on a high DPI screen. Is there a working solution now? Or
> >> has this been resolved in the latest 1.9.4 beta version? Thanks.
> >>
> >>References
> >>
> >> Visible links
> >> 1. mailto:yujie.wu_at_gmail.com 

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/