You say your monitor has a resolution of:
and yet you post screenshots of 1705 * 889 pixels.
Please check if the output of your video card is set to the hardware resolution of your monitor.
And next time you post screenshots, also make them smaller. Preferably small cutouts that are yet big enough to show what you want to show. Take an example of the other screenshots in this thread, you can compare them easily without scaling issues of the forum software.
I originally posted a small, cropped screen shot but the post enlarged it making it appear more clear. So to prevent this distortion on posting, these last images are cropped from the 1280x1080 screen capture so not the full resolution of the monitor, but still large areas. I posted them as large captures because the posting distorts the images for small images. The original screen capture as posted here is at least 50% larger and does not accurately portray the image I see viewing KiCad directly.
This is a problem only viewing KiCad. There is no reason to suspect anything other than KiCad because there are no problems with any other program or Windows itself. In particular, I can zoom a web pages with near perfect rendering at all zoom levels. The ultimate limitation to the size of text in a browser window is simply what my eyes discern which is not what they used to. Even as I type this I can view the font in this window at much smaller sizes than I can easily see text in the KiCad display.
It seems very clear that there is something that happens between those two zoom settings that is significant with this issue. The one zoom setting and beyond is clear with the text drawn by strokes more than one pixel in width and in the other direction the fonts are misshapen and much less clear.
It would also be nice if the zoom factor increments were smaller. I canāt find a way to select an arbitrary zoom factor, only the presets controlled by the scroll wheel. They appear to be about 20% steps. In Firefox the steps seem to be 10%.
Rick
Hi BlackCoffee, I forgot to reply to your post. I think I do see some slight improvement when I select subpixel antialiasing, but itās not nearly enough to mitigate the effect I see between the zoom level that is pretty clear and the next one that is much less clear. However, it does seem to help with further decay in the legibility of the letters as I zoom in further. I can still read the text (with difficulty) four zoom levels in from the clear level. So that helps.
Thanks
One other commentā¦ While the different colors for different types of text may seem like a good idea, they arenāt really all that useful. Some of the colors actually interfere with visibility. Like the green pins against a yellow body backgroundā¦ not good.
I found I can change that and have. I made all text black which helps some with the legibility of some text. The notes are still not much different. Baby steps I guess.
The only way to make any valid observations about screenshots is if you post the same pixels as are on you monitor.
I do not know where the scaling happens, but itās not on this forum. Any screenshots I post are direct 1:1 pixel mappings from monitor to .png format.
The only solution I see is that you must start by fixing this scaling issue.
Sorry, your meaning is not clear. All of the images posted are actual screen captures. I crop them to remove the menus, etc. or to show a small portion of the screen. The size of these images do not end up being displayed at the same as the original screen .
This was a screen capture of a region of the display about a quarter inch tall. How tall is it here?
How can I note the KiCad zoom factor when I take a screen capture?
Rick
I realize the grid can give me the zoom factor. At the first setting where the text first looks bad I measure 1 inch of grid dots to be 1.66 inches on the screen.
The image above measures about 50% larger than the image in the KiCad app on my screen. Nothing I am doing changes the number of pixels in the image. It should be 75x48 pixels. Firefox reports it as 75x48 pixels. Yet it is larger here than in the KiCad app. So images posted in this forum do not appear on my screen as the image in KiCad regardless of the cause. So donāt judge clarity by these images.
How does KiCad handle scale factors in Windows? Iām presently working with a scale factor. I donāt know the number because Windows does not report it, but it is at least 125%.
Iām not sure any of this matters. I only see this issue in the schematic text in KiCad. Not in any of the controls or in any other apps. Other people see the same problem I do. The images shown here appear larger than they do in KiCad even though they are exactly the same, pixel for pixel.
It doesnāt make sense to compare experienced image quality by viewing screenshots. Pixel by pixel looks different anyways on different hardware and different viewing distance. Discussing attached imageās quality takes us nowhere.
I believe everyone now understands what the problem is. At least I do. I also told what would be the solution implemented in KiCad: using system fonts and some font rendering engine. The only alternative would be to create an application specific font rendering engine in KiCad, and that doesnāt make sense at all.
You can test with v5.99 (nightly builds) and see if makes a difference. If not, you can file an issue and ask if something can be done. Some developer might find some simple solution which makes text rendering a bit better.
Rendering in eeschema in general was already tweaked several times when the current canvas was coded. Maybe thereās still room for improvement, although I wouldnāt bet on it.
If OP has a monitor that is 1280 pixel wide, makes a screenshot, crops of the menus and then still posts a screenshot which is 1705 pixels wide something is seriously wrong, and any screenshots he posts here are not representative for what he sees on his own monitor.
Iām guessing that OP uses a 1920 pixel wide desktop and either his video hardware or monitor is doing the scaling.
On my monitor itās about 21*14mm, but the actual size does not matter, because it also depends on the pitch of the monitor.
Have you verified that you actually use the same resolution for your video card as the hardware of your monitor?
A simple test you can do is to make a screen capture of the whole monitor, then save as an image, and check the pixels. It should match your monitor resolution and therefore it should be 1280*1024 pixels.
What are your settings if you look at:
Eeschema / Preferences / Preferences / Common / User Interface
I have an āIcon Scaleā of ā100ā and a āCanvas scaleā of 1.0. If I set āCanvas Scaleā to anything other then 1.0 zooming in and out (with warp) does not work properly, but apart from that I see no significant differences.
I am also getting confused because multiple related but slightly different issues are mixed together and small inconsistencies. For example gnuarm posts: " I made all text black which helps some with ā¦" and then he post the small ā0.125ā screenshot which has blue text.
I also have a zoom setting where stroke width quite suddenly switches from 1 to 2 pixels width. For me this is a conscious choice because I have an old and big monitor and I prefer sharp edges above fuzzy aberrations of anti-aliasing artifacts, and this is a hardware limitation about which KiCad can do nothing.
Stroke width can only be ā1.25 pixelsā with anti-aliasing.
Probably youāve checked but, want to ensure youāre aware of Window DPI settingā¦
I seldom use Windows but keep XP around on Virtual Machine for a couple of programs I need to use a few times yearly. I forgot to mention thereās a DPI Scale setting (at least in XP).
Right click the Desktop and go to Advanced settingsā¦ maybe this will helpā¦?
I mispokeā¦ mistyped? The monitor is 1920x1080 just like 90% of laptops out there.
Yes, as Iāve mentioned, Iām already using that feature. Wellā¦ I suppose it is the same feature. Windows XP and Windows 10 donāt have much in common when it comes to the UI. I have the Windows zoom set for something greater than 100%. I canāt say what it is because the number that appears in the setting is not accurate. I know this from experience in changing it. Even stranger is there are two settings, both of which are more than 100% on my machine.
None of this matters because there is nothing unique to my computer display or settings as shown by the fact that others see the same problem and that the problem does not manifest in other programs. At lower KiCad zoom settings the characters on a schematic dissolve from well defined strokes into sequences of not very linear pixels. This makes the characters harder to read than other text of the same size in other programs on the computer.
Here is an example of text in the browser display that is actually slightly smaller than the text in the KiCad display. If you enlarge it you will see that it uses effective aliasing to make the text readable even when the strokes are not much more than a pixel wide.
The capture is from text I was typing with a 70% zoom setting in the browser. Before cropping the image was the full 1920 x 1080 of the display, after 140 x 60. The text was small, but readable. The size makes it a bit harder to see, but not the lack of clarity. It is actually a bit smaller than the KiCad text at 10 pixels compared to 11 for the KiCad text.
This is the KiCad display with Ultra Anti-aliasing turned on.
While it should look better, in practice it is not nearly as good as it could be as shown by the browser text. At the zoom in the schematic one inch in the drawing is 1.625 inches on the screen. So the text in the display is 0.08125 inches tall (50 mils in the drawing) or 11 pixels tall.
Rick
Browser text uses sub-pixel antialiasing (cleartype in Win speech) that uses the arrangement of pixel elements (R, G, B) to make the perceived resolution higher than real resolution.
For Kicad the characters are drawn just like any other graphical object. From your small example above, antialiasing performs rather poorly, and causes e.g. uneven line width. In my case, it even causes ugly teardrops near the ājointsā (green dots).
But as the guys above mentioned, thereās a goal to use OS native font rendering for EESCHEMA which will obsolete the issues, so for now just find the magic settings that work for you more than less.
This crushed my last motivation to even attempt to help in this thread.
Too man inconsistencies.
This tread is also dragging on much to long, and if an answer is not presented yet it seems unlikely adding more text will help,
Thatās what I hinted at in my previous post.
I donāt know why you two say that. There have been some very useful posts. Iāve gained significant insight into the issue and now understand that it is a known problem that developers are aware of and would like to address in a distant future release.
Not every poster understood the nature of the problem that was being discussed and wandered off into the woods, but that is expected.
There are also visibility issues with the grid. I expect that will be addressed at the same time.
Interesting that in the example there is no anti-aliasing apparent on the grid dots. I assume that means the grid is sized to the native display resolution so the dots align perfectly with the pixels and no aliasing is apparent.
Still, the images could be much improved if the stroke width of the text were controllable. The bold font is at least double the stroke width of the regular text and doesnāt have the same problem. It becomes hard to read as the image is zoomed out only because the lines start to merge. Something in between would be ideal. I believe Iāve said before Iād like to try a line width of 1.25 or 1.5 times the plain text width. I donāt think it would take much to reduce the impact of this issue to a point where it is not a practical problem.
Rick
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