Testing wanted! High DPI (Retina, 4K) displays

Hey all, I’ve just added a bunch of work to support proper scaling on hi-dpi displays. It’s probably not complete and I’d like to get some testing in before 5.0, so if there are any brave souls with such a display (ideally, over 200 DPI) and a willingness to run a nightly, I would love to collect some data from you.

The high DPI fixes are available in the latest macOS and Windows nightlies. Ubuntu nightly builds were down for security reasons and just came back up, so it’s still not available there. Fedora will have it in the next build.

Here is the information I’d like from everyone:

  • Operating system (including version! especially for Windows!)
  • Resolution and physical size of display
  • Diagnostic number in the eeschema General Options next to “Icon Scale”
  • Do the dialogs and forms have a reasonable size by default? Does any text get cut off, or are any fields too small to type in? If there are still rough spots, where are they?
  • Are the toolbar icons readable? What is their physical size on your display?
  • If the icons are not readable, what icon scale setting (“general options” or “display options” in each application) works best?

Usual disclaimer: I strongly do not recommend the use of nightly builds for production projects. If you’re not already using it that way anyway, I suggest uninstalling 4.0, installing the nightly to test, then removing the nightly and putting 4.0 back. In particular, no existing projects should be opened unless you back them up first. I take no responsibility for demons that fly out your nose as a result of using nightly for production.

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To clarify “ideally, over 200 DPI”, if your display is less than that and affected negatively by this I obviously would like to hear from you too!

Windows 10 64bit
3840x2160 13.9"
Icon scale 200%
Funny enough Schematic Editor Options ‘squished’ Footprint previews checkbox, otherwise most are great. Some of the small issues I have found:

  • Symbol properties in eeschema center Fields frame is about 20 chars which feels way to small at default.
  • Symbol Library Editor Part library search tree section is about 14 chars and should be 25 or so wider by default.
  • Footprint Builder Messages needs to be about 30 chars long and 20 rows to fit messages.
  • PCB Library Table Table and Path Labels need more margin on top and bottom. Buttons left/right margin.

Everything else looks great, and looks more consistent than most other EDAs. Thanks for the effort!

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Oh and a couple others in PCBnew:

  • PCBnew View menu is vertically squished,
  • 3D viewer icons aren’t scaled,
  • Update PCB from Schematic log is only a few rows and needs to be much longer,
  • Python console window should be twice as wide and long and a couple other log sections are short like in netlist loading, however that may be an intentional choice.
1 Like

Not that high resolution, but I report anyway as I sometime have problems with DPI scaling with other applications: With 125% font scaling on a 1920x1080 14" display in Windows 7 professional, latest nightly (2018-01-12 revision 650207a6e); Icon scaling is set to auto (70%) , they seem to be OK. I also use a 20" 1600x1200 external screen with extended desktop. Both Choose Symbols and Symbol Properties are too narrow, always have to expand them. For Choose Symbols, the preview pane is too tall and narrow and often have to be expanded to see details. They will reset on next load or next start of KiCad. See attached images.


(The randomly selected symbol is not too problematic, but more complicated symbols can be so.)

I’ve reported it as a bug some time ago: everything (pcb) disappears, when I set zoom under 0.55.
I have 4k 27" monitor (Philips 288P), Intel HD Graphics 4600, Windows 10 Home,

Application: kicad
Version: (2018-01-12 revision 650207a6e)-makepkg, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.3
libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2l zlib/1.2.11 libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.23.1 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.3 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.60.0
Curl: 7.54.1
Compiler: GCC 7.1.0 with C++ ABI 1011

Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON

Hey, sorry for the long wait. Thanks for the responses!

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