DOI: 10.5176/2382-5669_ICT-BDCS15.38
Authors: Raghavendra M and Ankita Singh
Abstract:
DPI stands for Dots per Inch and indicates the number of pixels your monitor has on a linear inch. In other words, this is the pixel density of the monitor. In the past almost all monitors had the same density of 96 DPI [1]. With the improvement in technology the size of the monitors are becoming bigger and bigger and their presence in the market is increasing tremendously,such as 4k and 8k monitors due to clear and perceivable user benefits suchas text legibility and image presentation. With the increase in display size the UI shrinks which creates a need for an application to scale at the operating system level. This problem can be easily solved in platforms like WPF and Direct2D but not in windows forms. Because the measurement units in WPF is not device dependent but however, this is not the case with GDI, GDI+ and Win Forms where the device dependent pixel is the main measurement unit. This means that if you define a Text Box which is 200 pixels wide and 20 pixel height and you run the form on a 192 DPI display, the Text Box will look smaller than it looks on a 96 DPI screen. Complex engineering applications need simplified UI representations to cut down the data complexity in terms of huge size of data. But this is what makes UI designer’s job tough, typically one chooses rigid and familiar/repetitive layout for ease of use and convenience of user. Now with advent of higher resolution display supports, there comes a new challenge to these UI designers. That is, to scale these UI designs in same symmetric and familiar layouts. Mostly we find technology framework restrictions for achieving such scaled UI designs. Each and every technology has its own drawback and neither of them will suit our use cases. The paper demonstrates how win forms scaling is unfit to scale a complex data representation. We then propose an alternative for custom High DPI support for UI Scaling with Complex data representation.
Keywords: Scaling; UI; Complex data representation; High DPI
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