So I have a raster background “texture” I want to incorporate across several screens. The total display area in Windows 7 on my 1366x768 touch screen without creating scroll bars happens to be 1366x764. Who knows why. That’s not really my problem.
I have two docking windows, one to the North which is 1136x88. I also have one to the East which is 230x764. Then my main window area framed by those two is 1136x676. This should all end up being a total of 1366x764 when placed all together.
So I took a 1366x764 jpg image I created and sliced it up into those exact dimensions. When placed back together in Photoshop, they align perfectly. However, when placed in these windows and then displayed on my monitor, the East dock is being scaled down. It “fits” on the screen correctly and the vector graphics are perfect. However, my raster image is scaled down because you can tell by its alignment being smaller from the top and bottom and nearly aligning as it gets to the middle. It’s basically squeezed down.
Something I noticed that maybe I don’t understand that could cause this issue…
There’s a light grey border in my designer area that says “Minimum Size” and I thought that was defined in the project settings as the size of the project. However, I changed those settings and it never changes there. My other two screens are within that area but the East dock window exceeds that Minimum Size area on the height since it goes outside that border on the bottom.
Some other notes… I have that East window set to no scaling and the minimum and maximum size to be exactly 230x764. And yet, it still seems to be scaling.
“Minimum Size” means if the client window is made smaller than the minimum size then scroll bars will appear in the client.
Check Project/Properties/Client/Launching is “Start Maximized” selected? Is the window’s “Start Maximized” selected? I don’t know for sure but they might be overriding your window’s minimum and maximum setting because it’s a docked window.
Have you tried anchoring your image instead of using Relative layout?
If you are designing your project for just one resolution size then I would probably try using floating windows and setting their X/Y locations in the designer.
Setting everything to be absolute x/y coordinates did indeed solve the problem but I don’t really see this as a final solution. Certain circumstances and some experimentation lead me to believe I will need the docking functionality. So while this is indeed a quick fix, it still doesn’t seem to explain the original problem and only helps to prove that something strange is going on with the docking functionality behind the scenes. Both of these settings should yield the same results yet the relative settings mixed with the dock settings exhibit behavior that I don’t think is normal or accurate.
Thank you very much for your feedback. You did help me learn a bit more and solve the problem in a way.
However, I still feel I am in need of an overall solution in this case.
One thing that is important to note is that docked windows only scale in 1 dimension. IE:North to South, or East to West.
This would mean if you had a header and navigation docked windows the space in the upper left where the two docked windows meet would not look quite right since the navigation window stretches north south, and the header window stretches east west. The main window would look even more out of place next to these stretched docked windows, since it can gracefully stretch in both dimensions.