Moho Forum

Hello everyone!

I am trying to set up Moho Interface scaling with QT_SCALE_FACTOR, which allows the scaling up or down of an application interface without having to change Windows display settings, so far I can't make it work, so I was wondering if QT_SCALE_FACTOR is supported by Moho, anyone knows?

Thanks for your time!

The reason I am asking this is that I have a 4K monitor and everything is tiny, if I choose large fonts, well, the text is bigger, but the interface stays tiny and the text gets cramped, but the icons and the swatches stay tiny, if I blow up the interface in Windows, say to 150%, the interface seems to scale properly, but the previews become huge, like, a 720p preview is almost as large as the monitor, to a point where it's not really usable, see picture below...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jWH3-n ... sp=sharing

Sorry for the link, but I can't seem to be able to show images directly in the post, no matter what online image hosting service I use!

Ugh...this problem again. I have to deal with this every time I get a new laptop or display.

The solution that works for me is to...

1. open the properties for my Moho program file.
2. click Compatibility.
3. Click change high DPI settings.
4. Enable Override high DPI scaling behavior.
5. Choose System.

Here's what the options do:

- System: Windows will use its normal behavior. Applications that don’t respect system DPI settings will be “bitmap stretched” to appear larger so they’re more easily readable, but will often appear blurry. This is the default behavior.
- System (Enhanced): Windows will scale applications in a more intelligent way. This option will result in crisp text and some other elements in applications that would normally appear blurry with normal System scaling. In the Creators Update, this only works with GDI-based applications. This new feature is why Device Manager and other system tools finally don’t have blurry text in the Creators Update.

After choosing your preferred option, click OK. You’ll need to close Moho if it’s running and launch it once again for your changes to take effect.

I have a few other programs that need different settings to display correctly. It's so annoying, but this lets me make the settings program-specific.

One more thing:

When setting Windows Scaling, on some computers I've used, Moho looks best when Windows Scaling is set to 150%, but unfortunately, Moho's UI doesn't seem to like settings that are not increments of 100 (100%, 200%.)

For example, on my Surface Laptop, everything is either very tiny at 100% or very big at 200%, and just right with 150%. However, at 150%, the UI layout or interactivity might be broken in certain places. (Sorry, I don't remember the details.) One solution was to reduce the screen resolution to 1920 x 1080...which works, but this aspect ratio is much shorter than the Surface display. I found a good compromise setting, which used most of the full height of the display, but this aspect doesn't match the FHD standard I use when recording for YouTube.

My text size is still tinier than I like, but it's usable. Physically, the Surface's display isn't very big, so I just live with this. At one time, I scaled the text using Windows, but I think this caused issues with a few programs (maybe Moho too, but I'm not sure.)

Maybe I just need computer glasses.

One more 'one more' thing...

If you have a dual or triple display setup...this gets even messier.

When I had three displays, I reduced the screen resolutions for at least two of the displays to get all three to a visually similar appearance. This made it easier to mouse across the display edges without getting too misaligned.

The tricky part was making sure Moho looked good on all three displays. But I mainly worked on only one of the displays (the Cintiq), so it wasn't too critical. This wasn't a perfect setup, but it wasn't bad to work with.

Now, I'm back to a single display setup, and I use Windows built-in feature to switch through different desktop screens (Ctrl+Window+LR Arrows), and it's fine. I have one for Moho, one for working in 3D, one for writing and browsing, etc. At least they're all the same resolution now.

Thanks for the reply, and sorry for the request, I was using Linux for the last 5 years or so, so I am a bit rusty when it comes to Windows, but yeah, I seem to remember about that, your suggestion sorta solved the problem, at least the quick preview scales with the Windows Display settings now, which is an improvement, and it looks like Moho doesn't support QT, so this will have to do!

Lost Marble did a lot of work 'under the hood' for Moho 14 related to how Moho displays things, and I understand we're only beginning to see the benefits. I don't know if this work is relevant to this situation, but it keeps me hopeful for Moho's future.

QT is an open source cross-platform framework for developing UI, very cool stuff, adopting it would solve all of these problems, just saying!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

Qt is great GUI software, in use by: DaVinci Resolve, VLC, Maya & Krita. It has some amazing features, but adapting Moho for Qt would no doubt be an uphill challenge.

Also, it is not fully Open Source for commercial users like Moho, and has some funky licencing model.

If the licensing works for Maya and Davinci, I am not sure why there would be a problem for Moho, and from what I understand, it sits on top of the actual software, the same QT code can be used on any of the supported platforms, a unified UI interface seems like a good idea, and it would solve the scaling problem on 4K screens!

Ugh! Yesterday, I learned that the Program Properties settings I suggested don't work 100% for Moho. The display scaling will be better for Moho in general, but it also confuses the Style Window's eyedropper tool, causing it to sample the wrong part of the screen. I guess if you don't use the eyedropper, it's probably okay? I'm not sure yet if anything else is affected. (LM has been informed.)

If you find a better solution, let me know. The other day, I searched for a program that could run Moho in a window using custom resolution and scaling settings. I thought something might exist for gamers, but so far, no luck finding one.

Update #1: actually, I found two possibilities: Windowed Borderless and CRU. I'm not sure these are relevant to my needs yet.

Update #2: CRU adds custom resolutions to the desktop settings and isn't program-specific, so that's a bust. Still not sure about Windowed Borderless. It's apparently a built-in Windows feature for running old games in a borderless full-screen window. It sounds interesting but probably isn't relevant to what I need.

Ok, I have a workaround for anyone running Moho on a small high-density screen.

In my case, I wanted to run Moho on a Surface Laptop Studio with a 14-inch screen, with the recommeded display resolution of 2400 x 1600 and Windows Scaling set to the recommended 150%, but it just wasn't working out for me. Windows looked great with these settings, but the Moho UI was ridiculously HUGE. When I used the suggested Program Properties trick described earlier, Moho looked better but the Style Window's eyedropper got broken (it samples the wrong screen area.)

I began to wonder, did I really need this insanely high resolution on such a small screen? No, not really. So, I dropped the display resolution to FHD size, or 1920 x 1080, set Scaling to 100%, and Moho looked MUCH better. Unfortunately, because the Surface display has a 3:2 aspect ratio, there were HUGE black bars above and below the display area which made the usable area even smaller, and Windows offered no comparable preset that used the full display area.

That's where the CRU tool I mentioned earlier came in handy. Using CRU, I was able to add a 3:2 aspect-compatible resolution of 1920 x 1280 to Windows Display's presets. After a reboot, I was able to select this new option from Windows Display settings, and when I launched Moho, it looked perfect for this screen!

With the Windows Display Scale set to 100%, however, Windows now looked a little smallish, but I saw Windows Display now recommended the 125% option. After I switched to 125%, Windows looked perfect. Then I checked Moho and it still looked perfect! Oh, and, yes, the eyedropper in the Styles Window works correctly too!

You can download CRU from the here: Custom Resolution Utility. Be careful NOT to click on any link on this page that says 'download' because they're all spammy BS. Be sure to click on the text link called cru-1.5.2.zip in the table about halfway down the page.

Before creating a new display preset, be aware that some display card drivers might not be compatible with certain CRU mods. My Surface has Nvidia graphics with the latest drivers and it seems to be fine with my setting. From what I've read, if the created setting is incompatible and you can't revert to a standard setting, you can launch Windows in Safe Mode and revert to the previous settings. To be clear, CRU does not make any hardware changes to your computer, it only adds the desired screen presets to Windows Display.

This setup worked out great for my Surface computer—no more taking off my glasses and squinting to use Moho! My wife has a different model Surface laptop with a slightly lower display resolution, and she was having the same problems running Moho on it. We tried the above steps and it worked great for her too!

I hope anyone with similar display trouble with Moho finds this helpful.

I can't confirm this but, with fewer screen pixels to draw, maybe my laptop will have a longer battery time now? I'm just guessing, so if anyone here knows for certain, please let me know.