FoxChart report problem with 4K screen

Gerrit,

This sounds very similar to a problem I had a couple of years ago. Like you, it worked OK on my main desktop machine, but not on a laptop under Windows 10.

In my case, the user with the laptop had increased their font scaling to 150%. When I suggested they set it back to 100%, the problem went away (this was at a resolution of 1360 x 768).

Does that help at all?

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

Hi Mike,

I just checked the display information. The native screen is 3840 x 2160 pixels. For my applications I run with 200% scaling, so I effectively use 1920 x 1080 (Full HD).
I just ran my application with no scaling at all. Everything becomes very small, but I was able to run the program. And with this 100% scaling the chart is OK.

Of course I can never run my application with the 4K resolution without a lot of work (make it DPI-aware).

So perhaps I need something to cut off the unnecessary grey parts of my EMF graphic in memory? I have absolutely no idea how to do that...

Regards, Gerrit

The chart should just be made with double width and height.

When you turn on 200% scaling, you don't reduce the resolution to HD, you still are 3820x2160 pixels. You just have a higher dpi.
A report in itself has the dpi of the printer, not the screen, but the screen dpi has influence on the preview.
Do you use foxypreviewer, becasue they made that dpi aware.



Chriss

Have you tried adding this to your early startup code:


Best Regards,
Scott
MSc ISM, MIET, MASHRAE, CDCAP, CDCP, CDCS, CDCE, CTDC, CTIA, ATS

"I try to be nice, but sometimes my mouth doesn't cooperate.

Hi,

I will work again on this next week.

Regards, Gerrit

Here is another link that may help - there are some issues with the rendermode on some machines. Looks like changing .rendermode = 1 may be an option. It just worked for me on some Win10 machines that wouldn't display:

Hi showiedash,

I was able to solve this problem by saving the chart to a file and using this file in the report.
Working this way is free of scaling issues.

Regards, Gerrit

I'm reminded when apple introduced retina displays with higher DPI they acted towards apps by scaling images up. The system reports a HD resolution instead UHD, for example, so the only benefit about the high DPI was with fonts and SVG rendering sharper.

I'm unsure how Windows exactly handles dpi when your app does not say it's dpi aware. I just experience output on screen being blurry, not wrong sized. But I'm pretty sure Scott is on the right track with dpi awareness making a difference. And I remember they made a fix in foxypreviewer to handle this correctly. I wonder a bit how it all comes together, as printer dpi and display dpi were already different back in the 90s when displays still were mainly 96dpi and printers started to have 150, 300, or 600 dpi, albeit only in black and white. So preview and print have a long history of being in different dpi and it's not just a problem of the VFP 9 report engine.

I see that your problem already starts on the preview, that is for the display, same DPI, actually. So all that seems irrelevant, yet the preview obviously thinks it has to lower the size of the image.

I guess using an image solves the problem as that problem of dpi mismatch has already been solved for bitmap images. But I think it's still worth trying to get the preview and printing rendering correctly to have best output quality. It won't change the look of such a bar chart much, but the text, especially the small year-month labels could come out much cleaner when you get to the bottom of the problem and can fix it.

The simplest fix in your situation would be generating the bmp with higher resolution than necessary, so it may be sized down in both the preview and printing pass, but to the right respective area.

Chriss

Here is a great article on GDI Scaling. Scroll down to the section: GDI Scaling for Developers. GDI Scaling was implemented in Windows 10 version 1703 (Creators Update). There is an example manifest in the section: Updating your GDI app to use GDI Scaling