DPI Scaling

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A recent (September 2009) purchase of a 17" laptop with a high resolution (1920x1200) screen uncovered problems introduced by screen scaling which I had not previously considered.

Vista and XP have a user option to adjust the assumed dots per inch (DPI) screen resolution. Without other knowledge, the system assumes 96 DPI. If you use a screen with higher resolution, text and other graphics elements will display with 96 DPI scaling and show smaller than expected. In my case, too small for easy reading with these old eyes.

My laptop screen is about 14.5" x 9" which works out to 132 DPI. I set the new resolution to 150% which is about 144 DPI which is very readable and still leaves more screen real estate than on my "old" 13" laptop.

Now to the part that affects Delphi and many other 3rd party apps when screen image elements increase by 150% over their designed sizes.

	Every TForm has an AutoScroll property which defaults to True and an AutoSize property which defaults to False. Most apps will therefore appear with the designed pixel size and scroll bars added to adjust for the scaling that has enlarged text and most contained controls. Swapping these values (so that AutoScroll=false and AutoSize=true) resolves many of the scaling problems.
	If the form has many controls placed directly on it, AutoSize will resize the form just enough to enclose them all, but leave no margins around those touching the edge. Controls which contain other controls and have their Alignment property set to alClient work well. The best way I've found to fix the "no margin" problem is to cut the existing controls, then add a TBevel aligned as alClient and paste the controls back into it. You'll have to temporarily set the form's AutoSize to false to expand the form and the TBvel to leave margin space around the other controls.
	The AutoSize property is defined in TControl but it is not exposed in every descendent. So while a TLabel will automatically expand to show it's caption text, a TCheckBox will not. In those cases I have simply expanded the control to fit the larger text and assume that smaller text will still display fully.

I have converted a couple of programs (Brute Force and WordStuff 2 so far) and don't plan on any massive conversion effort to handle DPI scaling. Changes will be incorporated as other updates are posted. If you use DPI scaling and run across a DFF program that needs fixing, let me know.

Original: September 18, 2009

Modified: May 12, 2018

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