Applications that scale badely on High-DPI Displays: How to Stop the Madness – via: SQLServerCentral

Many applications still scale badly on High-DPI displays: dialogs way too small, icons you need a microscope for, etc.

SSMS in High-DPI Displays: How to Stop the Madness – SQLServerCentral explains a great trick that works for many applications, for intance:

• SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
• Eclipse IDE
• Various Adobe applications (Fireworks, Photoshop, DreamWeaver, Illustrator
• Probably: Delphi

The trick comes down to enabling the PreferExternalManifest registry setting and then create a manual manifest for the application that forces the application to use “bitmap scaling” by basically telling it does not support “XP style DPI scaling”.

You name manifest file named after the exe and stored it in the same directory as the exe.

After that, you also have to rename the exe to a temporary name and then back in order to refresh the cache.

A quote from the trick:

In Windows Vista, you had two possible ways of scaling applications: with the first one (the default) applications were instructed to scale their objects using the scaling factor imposed by the operating system. The results, depending on the quality of the application and the Windows version, could vary a lot. Some scaled correctly, some other look very similar to what we are seeing in SSMS, with some weird-looking GUIs. In Vista, this option was called “XP style DPI scaling”.

The second option, which you could activate by unchecking the “XP style” checkbox, involved drawing the graphical components of the GUI to an off-screen buffer and then drawing them back to the display, scaling the whole thing up to the screen resolution. This option is called “bitmap scaling” and the result is a perfectly laid out GUI.

In order to enable this option in Windows 10, you need to merge this key to your registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide]
"PreferExternalManifest"=dword:00000001

Then, the application has to be decorated with a manifest file that instructs Windows to disable DPI scaling and enable bitmap scaling, by declaring the application as DPI unaware. The manifest file has to be saved in the same folder as the executable (ssms.exe) and its name must be ssms.exe.manifest. In this case, for SSMS 2014, the file path is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\120\Tools\Binn\ManagementStudio\Ssms.exe.manifest”.

Paste this text inside the manifest file and save it in UTF8 encoding:

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
	<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
	<dependency>
	<dependentAssembly>
	<assemblyIdentity type="win32" name="Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls" version="6.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="*" publicKeyToken="6595b64144ccf1df" language="*">
	</assemblyIdentity>
	</dependentAssembly>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<dependentAssembly>
	<assemblyIdentity type="win32" name="Microsoft.VC90.CRT" version="9.0.21022.8" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b">
	</assemblyIdentity>
	</dependentAssembly>
	</dependency>
	<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
	<security>
	<requestedPrivileges>
	<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/>
	</requestedPrivileges>
	</security>
	</trustInfo>
	<asmv3:application>
	<asmv3:windowsSettings xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">
	<ms_windowsSettings:dpiAware xmlns:ms_windowsSettings="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">false</ms_windowsSettings:dpiAware>
	</asmv3:windowsSettings>
	</asmv3:application>
	</assembly>

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ssms.exe.manifest
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This “Vista style” bitmap scaling is very similar to what Apple is doing on his Retina displays, except that Apple uses a different font rendering algorithm that looks better when scaled up. If you use this technique in Windows, ClearType rendering is performed on the off-screen buffer before upscaling, so the final result might look a bit blurry.The amount of blurriness you will see depends on the scale factor you set in the control panel or in the settings app in Windows 10. Needless to say that exact pixel scaling looks better, so prefer 200% over 225% or 250% scale factors, because there is no such thing as “half pixel”.

–jeroen

Source: SSMS in High-DPI Displays: How to Stop the Madness – SQLServerCentral