Possible to rescale a single window?

alex.forencich · 2014-07-04 07:23:10

I have a high DPI monitor (3200x1800, 15 inch), and some applications do not cope with this very well (e.g. ignoring DPI settings) and as a result are almost unusable. Is there any way to rescale a window? I don't want to resize it; I want to rescale it: the application 'thinks' that it is, say, 640x480 and renders everything as such, but then the window is actually displayed at, say, double that (1280x1024) so that each pixel becomes 4 pixels. Are there any accessiblity packages or window manager tweaks that support this?

stevenhoneyman · 2014-07-04 08:33:06

There's a GDK_DPI_SCALE environment variable might do what you want (only for Gtk3 software)

alex.forencich · 2014-07-04 08:39:35

Nope. GTK applications are not the problem. There are two specific applications that I have in mind, here. One is OpenTTD. All of its rendering is pixel-based, so DPI settings are ignored. The second is a proprietary piece of instrument control software that I have running in a windows VM (Agilent serial protocol analyzer tools). The application does not scale correctly with the windows DPI settings, so I have to leave the DPI settings on default, but then the application is very difficult to use as it ends up being very small. If I could just rescale the entire Virtualbox window to 150%, it would be far more reasonable.

I know there are magnifier apps that follow the cursor around, but what about a magnifier that is locked to a single window? That's what I'm interested in.

stevenhoneyman · 2014-07-04 09:08:01

Ah, OK. Whilst this doesn't really answer your question, it might help with half of your problem:

QEMU supports output scaling. For example here is Excel on Windows 3.1... (and localc for size comparison)

progandy · 2014-07-04 09:09:25

alex.forencich wrote:

I know there are magnifier apps that follow the cursor around, but what about a magnifier that is locked to a single window? That's what I'm interested in.

I believe that is impossible. With compiz, you can zoom at least the whole desktop. Then you can use a key combination to zoom into a specific window, work with it and zoom back out.
http://wiki.compiz.org/Plugins/Ezoom

Last edited by progandy (2014-07-04 09:12:31)

alex.forencich · 2014-07-04 09:13:23

progandy wrote:

alex.forencich wrote:
I know there are magnifier apps that follow the cursor around, but what about a magnifier that is locked to a single window? That's what I'm interested in.
I believe that is impossible. With compiz, you can zoom at least the whole desktop.

It's certainly not impossible. Compositing window managers (compiz, xfwm) already have to copy the window area from an off-screen buffer onto the screen. Inserting a rescale into that operation would be trivial. Making it efficient is a different story, and whether anyone actually does that is yet another story. It would be a rather useful feature on high DPI monitors, I think.

alex.forencich · 2014-07-04 09:19:32

stevenhoneyman wrote:

Ah, OK. Whilst this doesn't really answer your question, it might help with half of your problem:
QEMU supports output scaling. For example here is Excel on Windows 3.1... (and localc for size comparison)
http://s26.postimg.org/sggq3mwyt/2014_07_04_T100319_1919x1079_scrot.jpg

Interesting. How does QEMU work with Windows 7 as a guest and USB passthrough of a USB network card from the host? The software I need to use runs in windows 7 and it has to have a dedicated network interface (the protocol analyzer it connects to is network booted) and passing this through with a USB network card with virtualbox is trivial.

stevenhoneyman · 2014-07-04 09:44:09

alex.forencich wrote:

stevenhoneyman wrote:
Ah, OK. Whilst this doesn't really answer your question, it might help with half of your problem:
QEMU supports output scaling. For example here is Excel on Windows 3.1... (and localc for size comparison)
http://s26.postimg.org/sggq3mwyt/2014_07_04_T100319_1919x1079_scrot.jpg
Interesting. How does QEMU work with Windows 7 as a guest and USB passthrough of a USB network card from the host? The software I need to use runs in windows 7 and it has to have a dedicated network interface (the protocol analyzer it connects to is network booted) and passing this through with a USB network card with virtualbox is trivial.

Flawlessly in recent years, it's been a long time since I had to use VirtualBox (which is good because it was still stuck on Qt4 last time I checked)

USB is like:

-usb -device usb-host,hostbus=3,hostaddr=4

Where the bus and device address you can find in `lsusb`

More info: http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=blob_ … xt;hb=HEAD

Last edited by stevenhoneyman (2014-07-04 09:46:40)

progandy · 2014-07-04 09:44:30

alex.forencich wrote:

It's certainly not impossible. Compositing window managers (compiz, xfwm) already have to copy the window area from an off-screen buffer onto the screen. Inserting a rescale into that operation would be trivial. Making it efficient is a different story, and whether anyone actually does that is yet another story. It would be a rather useful feature on high DPI monitors, I think.

I believe I read somewhere that the problem is not the graphics stack, but the positionig of the mouse pointer, that's why it is not really feasable.

Interesting. How does QEMU work with Windows 7 as a guest and USB passthrough of a USB network card from the host?

It should work with qemu-kvm
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Windows7Install
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/USB_Host_ … d_to_Guest

Arch Linux

#1 2014-07-04 07:23:10

Possible to rescale a single window?

#2 2014-07-04 08:33:06

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#3 2014-07-04 08:39:35

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#4 2014-07-04 09:08:01

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#5 2014-07-04 09:09:25

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#6 2014-07-04 09:13:23

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#7 2014-07-04 09:19:32

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#8 2014-07-04 09:44:09

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

#9 2014-07-04 09:44:30

Re: Possible to rescale a single window?

Board footer