Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Custom Cultures - WinForms Font Embedding Code with Ethiopian Amharic for Vista

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 07:58:29 GMT

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Custom Cultures - WinForms Font Embedding Code with Ethiopian Amharic for Vista and XP

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 07:58:31 GMT

PingBack from http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CustomCulturesWinFormsFontEmbeddingCodeWithEthiopianAmharicForVistaAndXP.aspx

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Cory Nelson — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:32:59 GMT

Did you intend for the Vista DPI scaling to happen? It looks like those are all being rendered at 96dpi and scaled up as a bitmap.

You need to call SetProcessDPIAware() before you create any windows to make the app truely use high DPI.

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Michael S. Kaplan — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 08:48:34 GMT

In this case, you have the source. So you know that I did not go to any special effort here along those lines, right?

Rhymes with Amharic #5 (a.k.a. [Sub]setting up this code where it can do the most good?)

Sorting It All Out — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 19:21:20 GMT

I may never be entirely used to working for Microsoft, as opposed to working with Microsoft products....

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Dean Harding — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 03:45:11 GMT

> I did not go to any special effort here along those lines, right?

That's why it looks so bad, then. For some reason, Windows assumes that applications, by default, are not able scale properly in high DPI modes and so it does bitmap scaling -- unless you specify in your manifest (or by calling SetProcessDPIAware()) that you scale properly. Even worse, WinForms (and MFC and pretty much every other GUI framework) usually scales perfectly well.

As a quick test, you can right-click on the .exe and in the Properties dialog, check the "disable scaling for high DPI" (or whatever it is called) and try making the screenshots again -- it'll look MUCH, MUCH better.

In my opinion, it should have been the other way around: by default, do NOT do bitmap scaling, but include it as an option. Oh well...

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Michael S. Kaplan — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:22:47 GMT

Okay, this is new info for me. :-)

I put up some screenshots at multiple resolutions with that checkbox toggled, you can try them and tell me if you think they look better than the ones in that first post....

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Dean Harding — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:54:06 GMT

Yeah, those ones look much better :-)

You can tell if you zoom in on the images. The old ones have two (or more) columns of blue/red pixels, while the news ones only have 1 column (which is what it is supposed to look like).

You can force it to work permanently with that call to SetProcessDPIAware() or using a manifest (though I've never been able to find the documented method for using a manifest in WinForms...)

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Michael S. Kaplan — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:31:02 GMT

It is weird though.

Why does the "Custom DPI setting" dialog have a "Use Windows XP style DPI scaling" (which I did not set) if it is going to do the old style DPI scaling anyway?

re: Rhymes with Amharic #4 (a.k.a. we're all [sub]set so turning out the lights and going to [em]bed!)

Dean Harding — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:55:32 GMT

The "old-style" scaling is what you see in the "new" screenshots. The "new-style" scaling is bitmap scaling when you don't have a manifest/call SetProcessDPIAware.

So if you have "use Windows XP-style DPI scaling" OFF then you get the ugly scaling. If you have "use Windows XP-style DPI scaling" ON you get the good scaling. Yes, that means Windows XP had better defaults than Vista (that's my opinion, at least).

It's all a bit confusing. Basically, the bitmap scaling was added in Vista, and is the default (except for a few well-known apps like Office, and ones that have the manifest setting). Bitmap scaling also looks MUCH WORSE than any other kind of scaling...

Font Embedding in Windows Forms

Venkatarangan's Blog [வெங்கடரங்கன் வலைப்பதிவு] — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:21:38 GMT

SiaO as The Red Carpet (aka Characters just want to be seen)

Sorting It All Out — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:05:59 GMT

Over in the Suggestion Box, Doug asks: Hi Michael, Your posts include a "This post brought to you by"