In recent months, many users willhave noted problems with screen scaling when using PCs and monitors withscaling switched on.

PC monitors have a nativeresolution, which is measured by the number of pixels across and the number ofpixels high. Windows software is built by referring to these pixels; forexample, font sizes are reported in the height of the characters in pixels (e.g.Times New Roman 12 is 12 pixels high).

In recent years, the resolution ofPC monitors has increased so that the density of pixels is higher on screen.This is great for watching high-definition video but causes a problem withthings like fonts. A 12-point font on a 1080p monitor is half the size of thesame text shown on a "traditional" monitor.

To compensate for this, Microsofthas introduced the concept of screen scaling. What this essentially does ismultiply the sizes of the fonts, text boxes, etc., by the scale factor. So at150% scaling, a 12-point font is actually drawn at 18-point, so that it showsthe same size on a small but high-resolution monitor as you would expect onlower-resolution screens.

This has essentially worked verywell for many years.

The problem has come with thewidespread use of multiple monitors on PCs—where these monitors are atdifferent resolutions and screen scaling.

Until recently, the scale of fontsand boxes on screen was set on the primary monitor for the PC, even though thewindow may be displayed on another monitor. This causes inconsistency indisplay.

To resolve this issue, Microsofthas changed the way that Windows scales and implemented something called "per-devicescreen scaling", which attempts to resize windows depending on whichmonitor they are displayed on.

To do this, they have introduced amajor change to the way that Windows software works with screen resolutions. Itdoes this by ignoring the actual resolution of the screen and instead uses thephysical size of the screen, translating this back to software as 96 pixels perinch—no matter the size. So a 15" screen at 1080p will return the sameresolution to software (such as Navigator) as a higher-resolution 4K monitor ofthe same size—even though it actually has four times the number of pixels!

However, most software is builtusing the older method of measuring screens, and this is causing Navigator todisplay incorrectly on monitors that implement screen scaling (even if you onlyhave one monitor).

The symptoms are text that showseither very large or very small, where the text is too large or too small forthe box it’s in, and mis-positioning of text boxes, labels, and buttons on thescreen.

Fixing this isn’t simple—asNavigator uses a host of third-party software for its user interface. Wetherefore have had to override the standard behaviour of the third-partysoftware—as well as our own—to work in the new environment.

This is taking significant time tomake work, as there are also bugs in the new Microsoft update which we have towork around!

Our expectation is to have aversion of software that is workable in the next couple of releases (25.14 /25.16).