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aaeriam
Participant
March 26, 2022
Question

Substance Designer - Incorrect UI scaling when plugged in to external monitor

  • March 26, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 3420 views

Hi all 

I primarily work off of a workstation laptop that goes back and forth between being plugged into an external monitor and just being used by itself as a laptop.

If I plug in my laptop to an external display and then open Substance Designer, much of the UI text elements are scaled to be extremely large. This is fixed only by restarting the laptop every time I plug it into a monitor. Likewise, when I unplug the monitor and try to use Substance Designer again just on my laptop, the UI scaling on the text makes it look tiny. And this is, again, only fixed by restarting the laptop.

(Picture for reference)

 


Is there a setting or way to get the text to display correctly on both displays without having the restart my laptop everytime I unplug/re-plug it into my monitor? If it's important, the laptop is a 4k display scaled to 150% and the monitor is a 3840x1600 display at 100% scaling. I would assume the scaling number is reason behind this but I'm just guessing. 

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1 reply

Luca Giarrizzo
Community Manager
Luca GiarrizzoCommunity Manager
Community Manager
March 28, 2022

Hello,

 

Indeed, your assumption is correct. The font scale is impacted by the different display scaling used by each monitor.

 

To make the interface more consistent regardless of the display scaling used, go to Edit > Preferences. In the Preferences window, find the User interace section in the General tab and check the Disable High DPI option, then restart Designer.

 

Please let me know if that helps!

 

Best regards.

 

Luca Giarrizzo | Quality Engineer, 3D & Immersive | Adobe
    A
    aaeriamAuthor
    Participant
    April 6, 2022

    Hey Luca thanks for responding! 

    I went ahead and checked the Disable High DPI setting and restarted my laptop (I only saw the difference after restarting my laptop)

    On my external display, everything looked okay after restarting and opening Designer up. After disconnecting my monitor and opening Designer on my laptop display, all the text that was originally too big/too small had the correct scaling; however, all the text that was already the correct scale previously became tiny. To the point where I had to put my face right up to the screen to find the File menu and other neighboring menus.

    It looks like some of the text elements are affected differently by scale? Some text items scale just fine; however, others either scale too big or incredibly, illegibly small.  

    Luca Giarrizzo
    Community Manager
    Luca GiarrizzoCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    April 11, 2022

    Hello @aaeriam,

     

    Thank you for sharing these results. Indeed, UI scaling and font scaling in particular are not handled very consistently throughout the application.

     

    This is a known issue which is more technically challenging to handle than it may appear, due to differences in how widgets, menus and other UI elements are implemented. We hope to improve this in future versions but cannot commit to anything at this time.

     

    It is sadly a case of choosing the least bad display options. I appreciate your patience in the meantime!

     

    Best regards.

     

    Luca Giarrizzo | Quality Engineer, 3D & Immersive | Adobe
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