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Hi all. After a DataCad (v19) hiatus, I'm coming back to an issue that I may posted a ways back. This issue may have begun when I installed DC on a new laptop (with an external monitor hooked up in extended desktop). Text, symbols and I think even lines are displaying much heavier than they used to. It gradually looks better as I zoom in. Printing is fine.

I know there are some settings for display weights, and I think I've played with a lot of them, but nothing seems to improve, including changing font. (Tried both SHX and TTF fonts.)

Image attached. (It's not a real project! Just part of a base drawing for students.) Running Windows 10, DataCad v19.

Thanks in advance.

Check the font weight. Other than that what resolution are you running?

I don't think you can thicken dimension lines, even by accident so, by themselves, it seems that you have a display problem, i.e. not DataCad. In a situation like that, TTF fonts would be the kiss of death. It could be that DataCad makes the problem look worse than most other programmes do. I seem to recall having rotten drawings on a laptop but the resolution was not that different from the "native resolution".
Time to right click on a vacant bit of screen and check that the resolution is "recommended"?

Thanks Nick and Joseph.

Do you mean the pen width? In the example, the width is 0.07, and the display thickness doesn't seem to be affected by the pen width. Is that what you mean?

Resolution is 1920 x 1200 on the laptop and 1920 x 1080 on the external monitor, which are the recommended settings for each. There is no visible difference between the laptop screen and the monitor.

I need to boot up the old laptop (and switch my DCAD license over) to see if it has the same issue. Will follow up here.

I didn't recall having the display issue in the old laptop -- but it does. Not sure if that means it must be a setting somewhere in DataCad, or if both laptops have a Windows display setting that needs to be changed. Hard to image it's a Windows setting, though.

I tend to agree with Nick that it is most likely a display setting problem, as even the grid markers look overly heavy. Does the text in the top menu or on buttons display properly or is that heavy also? Strange that it happens on both computers though if the old one used to be fine.
It is possible to thicken dimension lines (using the change menu), so for the minimal effort involved it may be worth identifying one of the dimensions and checking that weight is 1 (I don't think that is the problem, but the symptom of improvement as you zoom in is consistent with what I see with a weight > 1).

Might want to check font weight. If that's not it do you mind sharing the drawing file to confirm if the problem lies withing the drawing file itself?

Might want to check this forum thread out which has several suggestions and links to Mark's post on the topic of display scaling. Also specifically this post to see if this might be your issue.

Thanks guys. Menu bar text is fine.

After checking a file in the old laptop, it has the same display issue. It was a while since I’d been using DataCad on it, and I may have just been ignoring the problem.

Font weight is set to 1. I’m attaching a screenshot of the dialog.

Thank you for your offer to look at the actual file. I can send you two aec files. Rather than attaching them here, I think it might be better to send them directly to you. I’ll send you both a note with my email address via your profiles here.

The one I’m currently using (Site plans 2022) is a very simple file that just contains base plans and elev’s for my students’ projects. The other (Lan_060517_DKS) is a “real” project from a few years ago. (Note that the GTV “EIFS Dtls” in that one seems to crash DataCad. Not sure why, and I don’t think it used to do that. But you might want to avoid clicking it.)

I noticed that when the font in that first file is set to Romans, it appears much sharper. But I haven’t found – in a cursory search – other fonts that look good.

In that second file a lot of the text is pretty sharp and was set to HLV_L. But, oddly, I don’t see that font in the font list.

[I’m by no means a power user BTW – most of my DataCad learning goes back to v5 - so my methods are seriously out of date, which will probably be evident when you see the files. Some day when I have some free time, I need to do ‘go back to school’ to start doing ‘real’ CAD.]

Thanks for your continuing suggestions!

PS - I sent an email to only Joseph since he said he could take a look at the file. But I'm happy to share it with anyone who is interested and might have clues for me.

Does the laptop Display Scale have anything to do with the problem. What scale is your display set to
Right click the desktop and select display settings

BE CAREFUL CHANGING THAT!

I just did, setting it to 150% and it RESET my DataCAD interface!

Changing it back to 100% did not put my DataCAD interface back to what it was...

Changing that setting did not appear to have any effect on the DataCAD drawing fonts.

Make sure you have previous version of these files to restore if you change that setting:
C:\DC22\DCADWIN.ini
C:\DC22\Support Files\dcadwindialogs.gui
C:\DC22\Support Files\dcadwintoolbars.gui

Thanks for the warning Joseph. Display scale is set to 125%. I recall having to futz with that a lot when I set up the laptop.

I'm on the verge of uninstalling and reinstalling DataCad with its default settings to see if that changes anything. I'd then bring back any custom settings (macros, symbols, fonts, keyboard shortcuts, etc.) one-by one.

David, I would suggest trying changing the display scale to 100% as detailed above, just to be sure how it affects your laptop.

As you know I could not duplicate the graphics issue with that file on my machine so it's still a mystery...

Be sure to have backups of those files to restore your GUI.

Changing the display scale seemed to only affect the Windows Taskbar.

And the clean install of DCAD 19 didn't change anything, so I'm at a loss. I can't figure out why my setup should be more problematic than others - especially since I have the same issue on both laptops. Am I just being too picky?

(It's not directly related, but the screen calibration is fine on the laptop while the circle is flattened a bit on the external monitor. The monitor resolution that the laptop is set for, 1920 x 1200, is not available for the monitor, 1920 x 1080), and both are on the recommended res. The difference probably explains the distorted calibration on one screen. But I'm far less bothered by that.)