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PC software title appears distorted (DPI / Font Size Problem)
Category: General


Question / Issue:
When I start the application, I can't seem to progress because the screen looks distorted / the buttons are not clickable.

Solution:
Are you having trouble running some of our software because, while the program appears to launch normally, soon the screen looks "distorted" or "cropped"/"incomplete" or when you click on the buttons (which might appear to be in odd places) nothing seems to happen?

Examples of non-96dpi problems

What's probably going on is this: your PC's video card settings may be to something other than the industry and Windows-standard of 96dpi. The solution, in a nutshell, is to set your video card DPI (dots per inch) settings to 96DPI. Note that this is not the same as your monitor "resolution", which is a figure such as "1400x1024"

Some PC manufacturers (especially laptop manufacturers) tinker with DPI setting when selling their devices because this can be used to give a false sense of 'quality' about their screens or video cards.

Probably your video card is now set to something other than 96DPI, and thus, due to the way Windows draws various objects, things have come out distorted for you.

The solution is straightforward: please set your video card's Dots-per-inch setting to 96 DPI. For the vast vast vast vast majority of users, this will have no discernible effect on your system except that the program in question here (and other affected programs) will now work and display correctly.

Where do you set this DPI setting? This depends on the specific make and model of your video card as well as your operating system version. Often, this is in the 'advanced' tab of your display settings. These two links may provide some guidance:

(Please note the above links may at some point stop working as they refer to external sites - however, they are all more or less similar to each other and were obtained from Google searches such as "96 DPI in Vista", so please try an equivalent search if the links don't work for you).

Under some recent versions of Windows, it may be possible to set this on an application-by-application basis, by right clicking on the application icon, selecting "properties", and then looking for something like "run this software in 96 dpi compatibility mode" or something like this.

Setting the DPI to 96 DPI has solved 100% of the problems like this that users have brought to us.

How to set 96 DPI
How to set 96 DPI

How to set 96 DPI