Menu system doesn't work

[perrybrus]

When I click any menu item in the top, for instance File, Edit, Layout etc I get the drop down list BUT when I try to move down in the menu it skips to menu that is left of it! So never get to explore the menues with my mouse. Is this some new surprise from Adobe in last update too? 

[perrybrus]

You wrote: "I suspect a bad video driver in your case." I'm getting a little confused to how I should interpret your response here BobLevine cause just minutes later you reply: "I didn’t say it was a bad driver".

I'll make sure it is mentioned. I've had some slight response issues with the menu systems in IND and PS before on former setups, but they have passed as unknown and mysterious. It been known to happen that corrupt drivers or obsolete drivers, or even specific graphic cards can create similar problems - but the ones I'm experiencing now is by far the worst I've ever seen. It's actually comical to set the cursor at a menu point in IND and see every menu section suddenly start to open, "tremble" and go totally mad. It gave my next side colleague big eyes and something to tell hid grandchildren in 30 years.

As you can see from that article this 4K on windows thing has been raised for many years. I have yet to find anything about bad drivers causing the same problems - but I guess it's worth taking into consideration. After all, nothing surprises me anymore. That includes Adobe by the way.

[BobLevine]

I said I suspected it. That means it's worth looking at to eliminate it. I think you'll find most (not all) of the problems with HiDPI and Windows were before the Fall Creators Update, especially with dual monitors. That article you linked to is FOUR YEARS OLD, refers to Windows 8 at the latest and AFAIC is completely irrelevant to the current discussion.

BTW, do you have a single monitor or dual? Is this a desktop or a laptop?

[perrybrus]

Yes, the article is four years old and that says alot about this problem as it hasn't been straighten out yet. All the newer articles suggests I adjust the scaling in the OS and then readjust the scaling options in Adobe, like this one Blurry apps ruining your 4K monitor? Adjust high-DPI scaling in Windows 10 but as mentioned before that doesn't cut it in my case. It's still a mess in terms of scaling. My problem is not blurry Adobe apps however, but as so many other articles point out (and the list is the first article) other applications like ftp clients, winrar, winzip and numerous small but handy tools do get blurry. 

You bring up another interesting aspect however cause the 27" monitor is attached to a laptop. I'm using display port as always. Directly from the laptop USB to the external monitor. But if the resolution on the laptop and the monitor is the same at 4K, shouldn't that be pretty straight forward? I don't have the setup here cause I'm back home.

[BobLevine]

USB? Is it USB-C? Does the laptop have a display port out?

I really think whatever is happening here is specific to your set up. If it wasn't the forums would be flooded with complaints and it's not.

Can you take some screenshots tomorrow?

[perrybrus]

It's USB C as far as I know cause I remember asking the IT manager if it was USB 3.0 and he said no. It's a brand new laptop from Dell. This is my first laptop setup cause I've always had stationary graphic stations, and used laptops as secondary for mobile work. The Dell cable that came with the 27" monitor has USB on one end and display port on the other, it's just plugged into the backside of the monitor and into the USB connection on the laptop. I'm not very impressed by the number of USB connections on the laptop: ONE single!

I'm not sure if this is a setup issue alone cause then I wouldn't find so many articles that addresses the problems we are talking about here as a scaling issue and a mismatch between Adobe and Windows. Cause Powermac setups have no problems, they do the same thing in my office with those Mac laptops and everything scales great with no adjusting or tweking whatsoever. Also, Microsoft has made an article about this that's about scaling, so it can't be that rare. The article is touching on several different issues: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3025083/windows-scaling-issues-for-high-dpi-devices

And what about the blurry Windows programs? This dragon has many heads. I'll check out the setup again tomorrow.

[BobLevine]

Again, I wouldn’t even be discussing this if I hadn’t seen it work just fine here. Check those cables tomorrow and make sure you’re not using a standard USB (I’m not sure that would support 4K anyway).

We can pick this up tomorrow. Have a good evening.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Close InDesign, log out of your account (don't restart), log back in.

See if problem goes away.

[perrybrus]

Ok, so I have checked the connection setup again. It's a USB-C connection on the laptop. The laptop is as mentioned earlier connected to the external monitor with display port on the monitor end. Both laptop and monitor is brand new from Dell by the way, so same vendor for cables, monitor and laptop.

I made progress today after a "techy" person at work made some changes to the Windows registry, he added some commando lines and different stuff, this is not my area so I stayed clear, but it obviously changed things for the better. After that procedure I had to enter 150% in the scale and layout properties in Windows 10 again and I went trough the UI scaling properties in every single Adobe app I use. After that I did a couple of re-boots and turned the laptop power off and on. Here's the current status:

Photoshop
UI scaling set to Auto. Everything looks to be scaling fine so far. Both full screen and when manually scaled down by dragging the corners etc. Menu text, palettes, documents, rulers, toolbars, UI icons are looking fine. There are no blurry parts that I have noticed so UI text and symbols etc looks crisp. I haven't noticed any menu lag or weird things going on with menu animation or similar. Palettes also fly out and close like normal.

Illustrator

UI scaling is set to "For High PPI displays, scale the user interface."  Underneath that I chose the option "Scale to Higher Supported Scale Factor" Almost everything looks fine in terms of scaling. Both fullscreen and not. For UI size almost as good as Photoshop except I'm getting some micro text in a few areas, for instance the text defining compound path inside a document looks super tiny. Other than that there's some "trembling" when I drag document windows from corners and/or the whole app UI like I did in Photoshop. Illustrator looks to be shaking a bit when I do that. I've experienced this on other setups as well, my perception is that Illustrator acts less stable than Photoshop in general anyways.

InDesign

UI scaling set to Scale to Lower Supported Scale Factor", in oher words the opposite of Illustrator! I did that cause it worked better in InDesign. I haven't experienced any problems with scaling in InDesign now so it works as good as Photoshop. So it's a little better than Illustrator. All the top menu issues I had is gone (really hope this lasts) Based on this experience I returned to Illustrator and changed from "Scale to Higher Supported Scale Factor" to LOWER Scale Factor. After closing and opening Illustrator it looks the same as before. What should I choose?

Bridge

UI scaling is set to Auto. Both 100% and 200% was messy. However, best case scenario here was an over-sized UI. It looks chunky in terms of size so it clearly didn't scale as good as the rest. The UI text and the functionality works as normal In 100% it became super tiny and not readable. I have no idea why Bridge don't scale to 4K like the other apps.

XD

There are no preferences in XD, thus no scaling options either. I actually haven't thought of that before I started looking. There's no menu for options for prefs at all, however scaling looks fine. Also seems to be working as good as Photoshop in terms of menus, palettes, crispness and functionality. I didn't play around more than 5-10 minutes with XD but seems to be scaling fine so far at least.  

It's quite frustrating that scaling doesn't work the same on all Adobe apps on Windows. The different settings and the different choices seems odd to me. Also a bit weird that Illustrator seems to be working exactly the same with two opposite settings for scaling. Scale to Higher Supported Scale Factor and Lower. The latter seemed to be the best option for InDesign as that application didn't prefer Higher. How come?

So what do you get from this information? It's clearly a major step forward compared to yesterday. Obviously that OS registry file alteration did something right. And what about Bridge? Also wanna mention that Acrobat Reader scales chunky, the UI with text, symbols/icons and everything is as big as in Bridge.

I also want to mention that some older Windows programs looks very blurry on my 4K monitor still, I've read some articles on this matter and it is obviously as expected. That doesn't worry me too much cause those apps are not many. I'm more occupied with Adobe in general. All the Office programs seems to be scaling and adjusting to the 4K environment just fine. I've had no issues with Word and Powerpoint for instance.

[BobLevine]

Keep in mind, at least with ID, the scaling factor can only be 100 150 or 200. If you set the scaling to the lower supported factor it will go to 150 since that’s what the O/S is scaling.

Older apps are always going to be an issue. There’s nothing you can do about them.

[perrybrus]

I didn't quite understand what you wrote there BobLevine. Did you mean that I should alter the OS scaling to something other than 150% or did you mean that ID needs to keep the UI scaling I have right now?

And why do you think Bridge doesn't scale like the other Adobe apps?

[BobLevine]

I meant that if you don’t have the O/S scaled to a percentage the InDesign supports, the results are going to be iffy.

To be clear, I agree that Adobe has a ways to go with UI scaling. You might want to file a feature request here:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/

But do keep in mind that with two monitors at two different scaling percentages (the laptop screen and the external monitor) some of this is going to depend on which you have set as the primary.

[perrybrus]

The laptop screen is showing 150% as well because I have no other machine connected to the larger monitor. I'm working on the OS installed on the laptop so there's no variables there. I only have a secondary monitor connected to it. I also checked the monitor on the laptop today and it looked the same as on the bigger one, only smaller of course.

Yes, Adobe and MS are obviously not a couple in terms of scaling for 4K resolution. It's been alot of work just to get to where I am now and I'm actually still not sure if I want to continuous using 4K or return to the trusted native 2560x1440 setup. I don't do 4K video editing, all my design work is for web, mobile, photography and print work.  

[BobLevine]

Does your display properties show one monitor or two?

[perrybrus]

What do you mean? Everything that shows on the laptop mirrors what I see on the big monitor. It's the same source so there's no difference there.

[BobLevine]

Ah. I see. That could actually be the problem. Instead of mirroring them, extend them so you’ve got two separate monitors with different controls.

Like this:

[perrybrus]

Hm, I haven't checked what it says in that drop down. I'll do that tomorrow, but what's the purpose of doing that? It won't make Adobe Bridge scale 4K any better?

[BobLevine]

This will allow separate scaling factors for the two monitors.

As for whether it will help or not, well, we won’t know until you try it, will we?

[perrybrus]

Ok, I'll check it out tomorrow when I get back to work to see if it makes any difference. But with separate scaling factors, won't that leave one of the two (external monitor or laptop monitor) in trouble? The plan is to use that laptop as a portable work station from time to time and my experience is that each alteration of resolution or display connection will push UI elements in Adobe apps out of order again, so I'm forced to re-arrange everything. This happened to me several times today when I experimented with the OS scaling. I had saved my arranged workspace for each app but that didn't work, I had to re-arrange everything all over again. Guess I'll find that out tomorrow then.

[BobLevine]

No. Each will be scaled appropriately instead of a compromise based on the laptop screen.

[perrybrus]

That didn't work. My external monitor went black. So I went back to the setting named duplicate these displays.

[BobLevine]

Are you using some kind of docking station?

[perrybrus]

No. The laptop is connected to power. Monitor is connected to power. Both on separate connections. Monitor is connected to laptop via the USB-C connection with a display port connection at the other end going in to the external monitor. It's pretty straight. Same setup as all the other employees here.

By the way, I have noticed some other disturbing things today. When I drag graphic around inside a document in PS I get these strange pixel spots or artifacts if you like. Please see the attached screenshot. These spots remains on the screen several minutes afterwards, then they vanish. Do you think this could be related to the 4K issues? To me it looks like a graphic card problem. So much weird stuff going on that I don't know what to think anymore.

[BobLevine]

Honestly, I don't know. Looks like some kind of graphics glitch but again, could be a driver issue.

Can you hook a an external keyboard and mouse up to this thing and then close it up? That will force it to only see the external monitor.

[perrybrus]

The IT manager came around and had another look at the split screen features. Went back and chose Extend these displays. Now I have two monitors with separate and individual content as you mentioned but it didn't affect Adobe scaling. Situation is the same.

The IT manager agreed to go back to a non 4K display today and said he had already ordered another Dell with 2560×1440 native resolution. The new monitor is still going to be part of the exact same setup with the exact same laptop so I asked if the 4K laptop would interfere with a non 4K external monitor, he didn't know for sure, if so then I'll need a new computer too.

I wished for a stationary PC to begin with and I actually requested that and have the laptop as a side computer for mobile work,  but I wasn't heard. What a shame as that would give MUCH more bang for the buck in terms of hardware power. Well, the new monitor is supposed to be arriving anytime now - so this soap could contain more episodes...

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Since your computer has USB-C, the graphics card should have enough capability to power both the laptop and separate monitor. However, you should check the specifications on the built-in video card.

Does your computer support HDMI? As long as you have an appropriate cable (HDMI 2) and your video card can support an external 4K, use the HDMI connection. Plus, it would free up your USB-C for other things.

Each monitors should be set to the recommended resolution in the Display settings. Adjust the scaling factor accordingly. Check each Adobe software settings for uHD monitors but expect some glitches until Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple get everything updated properly for working with HD and uHD monitors.