FeatureRequest: Usage on High DPI monitors

[MarcusWolschon]

I switched to a new laptop and with that from 13" FullHD Macbook with VMWare to a 15" UltraHD Windows laptop with my Geomagic Studio 2015.1.1 .
I find all clickable areas in sketches, the start screen and many dialoges to be way to small (about 1x1mm).
I need to fiddle around for seconds to align my mouse pointer with sub-millimeter precision to do trivial
tasks like having a line start at an existing point because I constantly miss it.

The 6 context-menu icons next to the mouse pointer are about 5x5mm at this DPI level.

Is there any way to increase clickable areas around part features?
I know that I can increase font sizes to make text easier to read.
I already switched to a 3D Connexion CAD-Mouse to have the precision to hit these tiny targts at all.
It has become impossible to do any last minute changes on a train.

 

[HaroldL]

Part of the problem, as I have found, is that the mouse hot spot is only one pixel in size. As the resolution gets higher the pixels get smaller, relatively speaking. That does make it harder to hit the mark when selecting anything in any program. I have resorted to reducing the screen resolution from the native setting to something smaller. For example, on my lap top the native resolution is 1920 x 1080. That is too high for me to easily read text without some magnification (cheaters) so I set it to 1600 x 900, still not ideal but it helps out a lot.

To your point about setting the hot zone for pickable entities, I would think that is a hard coded setting in the application otherwise they could have a setting for it in the System Options like they do for Constraint Symbol Size. Maybe that would be a good suggestion to turn in.

 

[MarcusWolschon]

It would be great to change the hard-coding of clickable point diameters and of context-menu icons from a value defined in pixels to a value defined in pt/millimeter/inch using the DPI obtained from the display environment to calculate the size in pixels.
(Careful as not all displays attached to a machine at the same time have the same DPI. The primary display would be a good starting point.)

 

[HaroldL]

IIRC doesn't AutoCAD, AutoCAD Lt Draftsight and similar programs have a user adjustable "pickbox" on the cursor and Grip size on geometry? Something like that would be great for sketching in Alibre.

 

[MarcusWolschon]

I would not make it a setting. At least not right away.
Just define it in mm or pt and ask the System for the DPI of the current monitor (graphics context) to transform that into pixels.
Much easier to implement.
Then, if there is demand for it, you can still make it a setting later.