AutoScaleMode problems with changed default font
- by Doc Brown
Hi,
I have some problems with the Form.AutoScaleMode property together with fixed size controls, when using a non-default font. I boiled it down to a simple test application (WinForms 2.0) with only one form, some fixed size controls and the following properties:
class Form1 : Form
{
// ...
private void InitializeComponent()
{
// ...
this.AutoScaleDimensions = new System.Drawing.SizeF(96F, 96F);
this.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Dpi;
this.Font = new System.Drawing.Font("Tahoma", 9.25F);
// ...
}
}
Under 96dpi, Windows XP, the form looks correctly like this 96 dpi example.
Under 120 dpi, Windows XP, the the Windows Forms autoscaling feature produces this 120 dpi example.
As you can see, groupboxes, buttons, list or tree views are scaled correctly, multiline text boxes get too big in the vertical axis, and a fixed size label does not scale correctly in both vertical and horizontal direction. Seems to be bug in the .NET framework?
Using the default font (Microsoft Sans Serif 8.25pt), this problem does not occur. Using AutoScaleMode=Font (with adequate AutoScaleDimensions, of course) either does not scale at all or scales exactly like seen above, depending on when the Font is set (before or after the change of AutoScaleMode). The problem is not specific to the "Tahoma" Font, it occurs also with Microsoft Sans Serif, 9.25pt.
And yes, i already read this SO post
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2114857/high-dpi-problems
but it does not really help me.
Any suggestions how to come around this?
EDIT: I changed my image hoster, hope this one works better.
EDIT2: Some additional information about my intention: I have about 50 already working fixed size dialogs with several hundreds of properly placed, fixed size controls. They were migrated from an older C++ GUI framework to C#/Winforms, that's why they are all fixed-size. All of them look fine with 96 dpi using a 9.25pt font. Under the old framework, scaling to 120 dpi worked fine - all fixed size controls scaled equal in both dimensions. Last week, we detected this strange scaling behaviour under WinForms when switching to 120 dpi. You can imagine that most of our dialogs now look very bad under 120 dpi. We are looking for a solution that avoids a complete redesign all those dialogs.
