Are you using LabVIEW on Windows Vista?

[BrokenArrow]

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jun 2 2008, 10:53 PM)

....change the default fonts from Vista fonts (SegoeUI, which doesn't exist on XP) back to Tahoma...

That's good info, I didn't know that, thanks.

I know about that INI font deal, in fact it's all over the NI forums and I was on one of those threads years ago. However, my issue back then had to do with the fact that the EXE did not differentiate between a size 13 and size 14 Application Font, and would make them all 13, and we're talking about being on the same computer, same OPS. On a side note, I recently built an application in 8.5 which had 13 and 14 size fonts, and it did not exhibit this problem, and I didn't change the INI, so maybe it's gotten smarter.

I'll try the INI deal on our one Vista computer and see it fixes my array in Dev mode. What is odd is how it (Vista) chose a different font for the Integer and String arrays, even though they were both Application 14.

Richard

[jdunham]

QUOTE (BrokenArrow @ Jun 3 2008, 06:11 AM)

That's good info, I didn't know that, thanks.

I know about that INI font deal, in fact it's all over the NI forums and I was on one of those threads years ago. However, my issue back then had to do with the fact that the EXE did not differentiate between a size 13 and size 14 Application Font, and would make them all 13, and we're talking about being on the same computer, same OPS. On a side note, I recently built an application in 8.5 which had 13 and 14 size fonts, and it did not exhibit this problem, and I didn't change the INI, so maybe it's gotten smarter.

I'll try the INI deal on our one Vista computer and see it fixes my array in Dev mode. What is odd is how it (Vista) chose a different font for the Integer and String arrays, even though they were both Application 14.

Richard

I looked at your image. I think the fonts are exactly the same, but they are rendered to a different pixel size in Vista than they were in XP. Remember that integers can only be one line, so labview will always resize the numeric for the specific font size. For strings, the control itself does not resize automatically.

As a test, select all of those objects and change the font size to 8 or 9 or something. The numeric array will get a lot smaller, but the string arrays won't change, even though their fonts do.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (BrokenArrow @ Jun 3 2008, 09:11 AM)

That's good info, I didn't know that, thanks.

I know about that INI font deal, in fact it's all over the NI forums and I was on one of those threads years ago. However, my issue back then had to do with the fact that the EXE did not differentiate between a size 13 and size 14 Application Font, and would make them all 13, and we're talking about being on the same computer, same OPS. On a side note, I recently built an application in 8.5 which had 13 and 14 size fonts, and it did not exhibit this problem, and I didn't change the INI, so maybe it's gotten smarter.

I'll try the INI deal on our one Vista computer and see it fixes my array in Dev mode. What is odd is how it (Vista) chose a different font for the Integer and String arrays, even though they were both Application 14.

Richard

Actually it probably depends on the chosen font. Unless you use a TrueType (TT) font Windows will not scale fonts smoothly in one step increments. Those non TT fonts are not defined by glyphs but by bitmaps instead and they do only exist in a discrete amount of sizes. Windows does not attempt to scale bitmap fonts in one step increments because the result would be VERY bad looking.

Real TT fonts allow almost seemless scaling to just about any size. LabVIEW does not have anything to say about that. It specifies the Font Name and the size and attributes and Windows does whatever it thinks it can do. LabVIEW has virtually no further control about that other than querying the size of the resulting font to adapt its numeric controls to it.

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jun 3 2008, 03:47 PM)

I looked at your image. I think the fonts are exactly the same, but they are rendered to a different pixel size in Vista than they were in XP. Remember that integers can only be one line, so labview will always resize the numeric for the specific font size. For strings, the control itself does not resize automatically.

As a test, select all of those objects and change the font size to 8 or 9 or something. The numeric array will get a lot smaller, but the string arrays won't change, even though their fonts do.

No! the problem is that numeric controls adapt their height to the font applied to the number inside wheras strings do not do that. This is in fact a copying of Windows control behaviour which NI better would have left out IMHO. You can also see that you can not resize numerics in height but only in length whereas strings can be sized to any height independant of the font they display in.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[jdunham]

QUOTE (rolfk @ Jun 4 2008, 01:02 PM)

No! the problem is that numeric controls adapt their height to the font applied to the number inside wheras strings do not do that. This is in fact a copying of Windows control behaviour which NI better would have left out IMHO. You can also see that you can not resize numerics in height but only in length whereas strings can be sized to any height independant of the font they display in.

Rolf Kalbermatter

I think we were trying to say the same thing.

It would be great if you could set a string control (especially if input is limited to a single line) to scale with the font the way the numerics od.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jun 4 2008, 07:57 PM)

I think we were trying to say the same thing.

You are so right! Sorry

QUOTE

It would be great if you could set a string control (especially if input is limited to a single line) to scale with the font the way the numerics od.

Thought about that also at some point but was to lazy to make a product suggestion.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[jdunham]

QUOTE (rolfk @ Jun 4 2008, 10:05 PM)

Thought about that also at some point but was to lazy to make a product suggestion.

You inspired me, so I submitted this. Other people should go submit related ideas at the http://digital.ni.com/applications/psc.nsf/default?OpenForm' target="_blank">Product Suggestion Center Vote early and vote often! :thumbup:

QUOTE (LabVIEW Product Suggestion)

Numeric controls and indicators are only one line, so they resize when the font is resized. Strings controls get larger when the fonts get larger, but are not reduced in size when the font is reduced. This makes it difficult when the VI is moved to a new OS, or loaded on a different computer with different font display settings. I realize this is made more complicated since there is some limited support for multiple font sizes in the same control (not used in 99.99% of cases).

It's a real pain to get string inputs to line up (especially arrays of strings) when the display changes. Our current workaround is to set the fonts in stone and put Tahoma 13 in the INI files for all our built applications, but this is very limiting.

What I would suggest:

Add a string property which is "Scale to font size" and if this property is active, have a property "NumLines" (this would be analogous to "NumRows" in an array display). Those properties could also be combined by considering NumRows=-1 to be a fixed user-defined size (the current behavior).

If a string input is changed to "limit to single line" = TRUE, then default NumLines to 1.

[BrokenArrow]

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jun 5 2008, 12:54 PM)

You inspired me, so I submitted this. Other people should go submit related ideas at the http://digital.ni.com/applications/psc.nsf/default?OpenForm' target="_blank">Product Suggestion Center .....

I wondered where that was. I submitted my long time request to have Wire Labels that snap to wires! :thumbup: