Windows multi-monitor display issue

Hi, I’m running Ginga (the reference viewer) using Windows and it works and looks great on my laptop’s display (which has a high DPI screen) when I don’t have another monitor hooked up to the computer. However, when I hook my laptop up to a big 27" monitor (which isn’t a high DPI display) I can’t seem to get a reasonable display on either the laptop’s display or the external display, because the fonts are way too big in both cases. Here is what the display on my laptop looks like:

I think this must be happening because Qt (which I presume is doing the rendering of the windows) is having a tough time figuring out what to do with Windows’ display scaling needed to cope with my laptop’s screen. (I’m currently running at 250% scaling on my laptop screen and 100% scaling on the big monitor which is set up to be my main display). Is this hypothesis likely to be correct, and if so, is there anything I can do about it? I confess that I like Ginga so much I could be persuaded to upgrade to a 4K high DPI display on my main monitor just to handle this issue, but I kind of like my old monitor and would rather not upgrade if I don’t have to. In any case, before I buy a new monitor I want to make sure it will fix the issue.

Thank you!

Bob

P.S. I installed Ginga using conda install ginga -c conda-forge

[robertoabraham]

Hi Eric,

Good news… the problem was fixed by using the ‘turn it off and on again’ approach. I signed out of the account and then logged back in, and that did the trick. Ginga now looks great on both monitors (the only time it looks bad is when part of the main window is on one monitor and the other part is on the other, and I can certainly live with that). So I guess the lesson is that I just need to log out and log in again when I plug the second monitor into the laptop

By the way, to answer your earlier question, I’m using Windows 10 (version 1903).

The environment variable settings don’t seem to make a big difference to the outcome though if the QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR variable is set to 0 I do get an error on startup. Setting it to 1 silences the startup error, though in both cases the main window looked OK to me (though I didn’t compare them in minute detail with screenshots etc to see what difference it made). Anyway, here’s what the console reports in both cases:

(base) C:\Users\abrah>SET QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0

(base) C:\Users\abrah>ginga
QWindowsWindow::setGeometry: Unable to set geometry 2948x1729+2716+162 on QWidgetWindow/'TopLevelClassWindow'. Resulting geometry:  2932x1680+2724+203 (frame: 16, 72, 16, 16, custom margin: 0, 0, 0, 0, minimum size: 391x26, maximum size: 16777215x16777215).

(base) C:\Users\abrah>SET QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1

(base) C:\Users\abrah>ginga

(base) C:\Users\abrah>

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned this behaviour is fine and I think I’m good to go. Thanks for your help!

Bob

P.S. Hmm. The bad news is I now don’t have an excuse to buy a new 4K display. D’oh!

[ejeschke]

Feel free to close this if you think the problem is solved.