Too small fonts not only on 4k (150% or 175% scaling). How to make bigger fonts?

[xinni]

Hello,

please see the screenshot.

small.png

I did search the options for "font" and here in the forum I only found this thread and both did not help me to get a usable/readable fontsize on my windows 11 system on a 4k display with 150/175% scaling.

I have 2 monitors and on both the fontsize is very small/unreadable to my old eyes 8-]

I also tried to remove all the "font" entries in the xnview.ini, but that made it even worse to look at.

Here are the settings for both the monitors.

m1.jpg

m2.jpg

Any hints/ideas, so I can use xnviewMP again?

Even the About screen is barely readable to me:

about2.png

Thank you! (not shocked, but only big eyes )

EDIT: Maybe some more screenshots:

This looks good readable to me:

good.png

while those are really hard to read:

nogood1.png

nogood2.png

[Steerpike]

I've just started using XnView on a 2560x1600 screen, with 150% scaling, (windows 11) and the display is just tolerable, so I sympathize with you. I'm going to follow this thread with interest.

This app is not alone, though - even photoshop elements struggles with proper font scaling, and Quicken is an embarrassment (for such an expensive product).

BTW - '4k' is not intuitive to me (I view it as marketing hype); I always talk in terms of x/y screen dimensions (2560x1600, etc). (UPDATE - I see from your screenshot that you have a 3840x2160 display; so the '4k' is presumably a nominal reference to the 3,840 pixels ... )

[xinni]

BTW - '4k' is not intuitive to me (I view it as marketing hype); I always talk in terms of x/y screen dimensions (2560x1600, etc). (UPDATE - I see from your screenshot that you have a 3840x2160 display; so the '4k' is presumably a nominal reference to the 3,840 pixels ... )

Actually, I have no idea. It was sold as "4k" and thats almost better to say or write "I have a display that supports a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels." So I stick to 4k and everyone knows what I'm talking about, I hope.

Back to the topic, I guess, that the problem is not the pixelcount, but more that all those smallish shown elements are not coded scalable and use either hardcoded scaling/fontsize or a font+size, which is not available to the user via GUI or .INI

So that (and yes, XNView is not the only program here) seems to me like a lot of work for the developer(s) to find all the code and update it, and I sadly guess, it's unlikely that it will be accomplished in the next five years. (Similar to the dark-mode thing, apple invented and now every program "needs" to have it, because the users are shouting about it. It is a timeconsuming and diligent work.)

Well, that was OT, so lets hope we can help and support here!

[Steerpike]

What is the physical size of your 4k monitor? Is it a 27" monitor, a 42" monitor, etc? This would be the diagonal measurement, corner to corner. I'm working right now on my built-in laptop screen which is 17". It's the combination of 'resolution' (your '4k' terminology, or my '2560x1600' terminology - same thing) and physical size that leads to issues. My '2560x1600' resolution is barely readable on a 17" screen, but I have font-scaling set to 150% so that helps.

Ironically, buying a 'high res' monitor that has small physical dimensions is a recipe for disappointment. For the longest time, I wouldn't go above 1920x1200 on any laptop due to poor scaling support. Only recently has Windows finally built in some really good scaling support, and that's why this new laptop is now 2560x1600. But, as noted, Quicken and Photoshop are still not very usable - they worked much better when I had a 1920x1200 screen ("FHD" I believe is the buzzword for that res).

One thing I've noticed - programs that work on both Apple and Windows platforms seem to have more of an issue with this. I'm guessing that the way Windows handles scaling is totally different from the way Apple handles it, and if the developer wants to maintain a common code-base, the Windows display suffers. How else can Photoshop - which is an extremely expensive and 'high end' product - have such a hard time dealing with font scaling on Windows!
In Photoshop Elements (I can't justify the cost of the full Photoshop these days), they have a feature where you can change font sizes in the UI but - 'large' (200%) is ridiculously large (almost cartoonish), while 'small' (100%) is too small. For some reason, they can't provide a user-defined scaling factor, and ... I guess offering 150% would be just too much work!

This is Photoshop Elements 2023 at 100% scaling - the menu bar at the top is virtually unreadable on my screen:



And this is the EXACT same screen in PE at 200% scaling - the menus and fonts are so big, there's no room left for the actual image!



I don't think this is off topic at all, though - my guess is, the developers of XnView are running into the same issues that Photoshop is running into; they are using some libraries that are common between MacOS and Windows and they just don't handle scaling well. If Adobe can't fix this, not much hope for a freeware program like XnView perhaps. I hope I'm wrong! Actually - for me - XnView is MUCH BETTER than Photoshop in terms of UI scaling; but I think in your case, your monitor is such high resolution that you are inadvertently suffering.