Supporting different monitor resolutions

Question

I have a MFC application with some bitmaps, dialog boxes and menus. Currently it supports only one monitor resolution (1280x1024). I am planning to add different monitor resolution support to it. To do that I guess I have to load different resolution bitmaps, change the font size etc. My question is, how these are handled in a typical windows application? Do they use a single bitmap and stretch/shrink it according to monitor resolution or actually have different set of bitmaps in the resource and load them dynamically depending on the resolution? Is there any standard solution to this?

Answer 1

In the past I have used one large image and scaled accordingly.

Making sure that the menus and dialogs resize is tricky but there are helper codes on CodeProject that could help.

Answer 2

I would say to use multiple resources with different resolutions. While you can scale the icons dynamically, they'll probably look better if you resize them in a proper image-editing program.

Answer 3

Menu and toolbar icons are normally displayed with the same number of pixels regardless of screen resolution. Thus menus and toolbars take up a smaller proportion of the screen as the resolution increases.

I don't think there's any standard way of handling different resolutions where bitmaps are concerned.

Answer 4

I would also make sure your application works with Windows DPI scaling. That might be a better alternative when running on higher resolution displays rather than having to redesign the application to meet a specific resolution.

Answer 5

Scaling bitmaps will look bad (making them bigger will always look bad, making them smaller kind of depends on the source). If possible, see if you can compose your big bitmap of several smaller bitmaps that can scale nicely. Lots of times it is fairly easy to make a bitmap that can scale in one direction nicely. For example, if you want to make a frame around something, instead of using one bitmap, cut it up like a tic-tac-toe board into 9 pieces. the four corner pieces stay their original size, the top and bottom pieces stretch horizontally, the left and right vertically, and the center goes both directions (if it is used at all).