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User interface elements blurry, very small or missing

Author: Thomas Hjermitslev Last updated:
Display Scaling Screen resolution User interface

Symptoms

The user interface looks blurry, items are very small or items are missing from the user interface. This may only happen when logged into a remote desktop session.

Error Message

None

Cause

Issues with display scaling.

The application is displayed in another display scaling factor than it was initially opened in

TimeXtender is DPI-aware, which means that it should display properly in the scaling factor of the primary monitor. However, if you move the window to a monitor with a different display scaling factor, Windows will scale the application. Since this basically resizes the application like you would enlarge a picture in a photo editor, this will make the application look slightly blurry. Even when text and UI elements look crisp, bitmap elements in the user interface, such as icons, might look blurry since they are not rendered for all scaling factors.

The application is displayed in a custom scaling factor

While there should not be issues with incorrect item size and missing items in standard scaling factors such as 125%, 150% or 200%, custom scaling sizes are not guaranteed to work.

Display scaling factor is more than 100% and TimeXtender version is below 20.10.12

TimeXtender 20.10.12 included numerous improvements and fixes to the application's scaling support. Earlier versions have issues in any scaling factor other than 100%.

Resolution

Ensure that your computer's display scaling factor is not custom and the same on all monitors. 

  1. On the Start Menu, click the settings (gear) icon
  2. In Windows Settings, click System
  3. Ensure that the value in Change the size of text, apps, and other items list is the same for all monitors.
    mceclip0.png

If you are having this issue on a remote desktop connection, this resolution will not work unless you follow these steps carefully:

  1. Sign out from your remote desktop connection.  Simply "disconnecting" will not work.  You must find the Sign out option under the start menu or power options and choose that exact option.  This is  because the connection must be completely reset for the fix to work properly. 
  2. Adjust the scaling on your local machine.
  3. Reconnect to the remote desktop. The change should take effect. 

TimeXtender version below 20.10.12

If your are using a TimeXtender version older than 20.10.12, consider upgrading to take advantage of the improvements to scaling support. If that is not an option, you can let Windows scale the application. As mentioned above, this will make the application look blurry. However, the application should be perfectly usable.

  1. Go to the folder where the application is installed. The default is 
    'C:\Program Files\TimeXtender\TimeXtender <version>'
  2. Right click 'timextender.exe' and click Properties
  3. (for Windows 10, click on "Compatibility" tab)
  4. Click Change high DPI settings 
  5. Select Override high DPI scaling behavior and click 'System (enhanced)' in the Scaling performed by list.
    mceclip1.png
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6 Comments

Date Votes
  • 1
    Avatar
    Jan De Dycker

    Sorry, but this isn't a viable solution.

     

    All other software does actually work using scaling, such as SSMS. This "fixes" the issue that TX isn't properly set up for scaling, but breaks all other software that, since half a decade, is.

  • 1
    Avatar
    Martin Dideriksen

    For me at least, it helps, when using the Remote Desktop App for windows 10 (download from Microsoft store).

    In this, you are able to set the resolution on the RDP session - Far from perfect, but it helps, while we are waiting for better scaling in TX.

  • 1
    Avatar
    Thomas Hjermitslev

    We are aware of the scaling issues and fixing them is in the backlog.

    I've updated the article with a second resolution option: Let Windows scale the application. This should enable Discovery Hub to play well with better-scaling applications at the expense of some UI fidelity in Discovery Hub.

  • 0
    Avatar
    Jan De Dycker

    Thanks Thomas and Martin.

    I've noticed that it's less of an issue on newer servers, but Win 2012 and older seem to struggle.

    At this time, we still see a lot of Win 2012 unfortunately.

  • 0
    Avatar
    Stuart Cuthbertson

    Just want to highlight Martin D's point - custom scaling per connection in Win10 Remote Desktop app has just saved me! 

     I normally work at a multimonitor setup and have never had problems with TX font size, but (thanks to a certain virus) am currently working on just my 15" laptop screen with native 1920x1080 resolution. I found that setting my remote desktop connection to our TX DH instance at 1280x720, with scaling at 100%, makes DH usable.

    As suggested by this article, at any resolution, increasing the scaling of the RDC to 125% or 150% made things worse. 1280x720 was also the highest resolution at which the result was usable for me, I tried multiple steps from 1920x1080 downwards first.

    To Jan's point, our TX machine is Server 2012 R2. (Yes, I know... :-( )

  • 0
    Avatar
    Thomas Hjermitslev

    TimeXtender 20.10.12 contains significant improvements to the support for high DPI scaling. While there are bound to be edge cases that will cause issues, scaling should now work as expected with the limitations noted in the newly updated article.

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