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High DPI Display

Since Windows 8.1, applications have had the ability to scale their user interfaces themselves, thus making the application appear clear and correctly sized on high resolution displays. Applications could also elect to allow Windows to do the scaling which made the user interface look blurry but properly sized on high resolution displays. Before Windows 8.1, Windows had to do the scaling. This scaling capability in Windows 8.1 and later is called 'DPI Awareness'.

Deep-Sky Planner 7 originally shipped with DPI Awareness enabled. The user interface was usable on Windows systems with display scaling set to 150% or less. Scaling was not suitable above 150%.

A small but growing number of users reported that the Deep-Sky Planner 7 user interface was too small at 200% and larger scaling on Windows 10.

Knightware has researched the issue for several months and determined that multiple problems exist in addressing the issue effectively. In short, DPI Awareness is a moving target with problems in Windows itself, and multiple problems in the development tools used to produce Deep-Sky Planner.

With the release of version 7.1.0.0, Deep-Sky Planner is no longer DPI Aware by default. If you prefer the appearance of Deep-Sky Planner when DPI Awareness is enabled, you can enable it by checking Options | DPI Awareness. You must restart Deep-Sky Planner for the option to take effect, and this only works on Windows 8.1 and later.

Knightware will continue to monitor the progress on this issue in both Windows and development tools. We will release improvements to DPI Awareness as available technology improves.