Controls and indicators move on front panel

[Gary_H]

Hi,

Having created a gui and distributed it as an exe, I have found that some controls and indicators do not appear

at the location they were not intended on another user's monitor. But most controls/indicators are okay.

One of the 'moving' controls had to be deleted and re-created again for another reason, this then located okay.

So why should just a few controls/indicators move slightly from their intended position when displayed on another monitor ?

(Labview 2014 SP1)

Thanks,

Gary.

[RavensFan]

Two possibilities I can think of:.

1.  You have the controls set to move or reposition when the window size changes.

2.  You placed things on one Windows version and opened it in another.  For instance, the default Windows system fonts got larger between WinXP and Win7.  So stuff laid out on WinXP looks wroing when the font grows when you open it in Win7 messing up your layout.

[Gary_H]

Thank you for the reply.

To respond to your suggestions:

You have the controls set to move or reposition when the window size changes.........

- In VI Properties/Window Size, I have tried selecting "Maintain proportions .. for different resolutions...", but this was not a solution

Is there another way to move/reposition a control, perhaps another menu option?

Also it's just a small number of controls/indicators that move to a slightly different place, i.e. over another control. 

You placed things on one Windows version........

- Win 7 is the only operating system in use.

Gary. 

[RavensFan]

Right click on the controls and see if it has scale object with pane set.

I'm thinking that a few controls have that set, but when you delete and put new ones down, they don't have that set.

As for "maintain proportions", that and any of those options are really difficult to get them to work right.  If you open a VI and shrink the window down then stretch it back out again, does it mess things up?  If so, that's an indication some of those "helpful" settings are set.

You can spend a lot of time working with those settings to that you can make your window truly dynamic with window size and resolution, or you can turn off all those settings and just design your front panel for what you expect to be the lowest resolution it will see.

(If you do work with the settings, there were a few posts on the forums describing how to use panes and splitters to control what objects resize and which don't.)

[Alexander_Sobolev]

It can also happen that system font settings are different. If Vis are to be transferred between systems, do not use system (dialog or application) font on front panel. Ctrl+A - set Segoe UI (standard windows 7 I believe). You need to open and change separately typedefs that are visible to the user and graph axis fonts.

[Alexander_Sobolev]

>> So why should just a few controls/indicators move slightly from their intended position when displayed on another monitor ?

Slightly is it 1 pixel? Do monitors have the same resolutions? Do these controls have the same type? It can be a rounding error of the not vector graphics.

[Gary_H]

Hi Alexander,

To answer your queries:    Slightly is it 1 pixel? 

If you imagine an OK Button being placed near to a String Indicator such that the distance between the two indicates an association to the user,

when the control moves on the non-development PC screen, it will partially overlap the String Indicator, i.e. there is no longer a gap between the two.

Do monitors have the same resolutions?

My monitor, (Development PC), has a resolution of  1280 x 1024.

The monitor where the problem can be seen is 1600 x 1200.

To try and re-create the problem I set my monitor  to 1280 x 960, the idea was to replicate the same ratio of 4:3.

This proved nothing, but then it is only 1 control amongst several other controls/indicators on the same pane and I'd

expect the ratio to affect all.

[Gary_H]

Alexander,

Here are screenshots to demonstrate the problem:

 

The LED indicator has moved over the Connection Information text.

The string indicator (SQL Command) has moved over the bottom of the array indicator.

Both images were captured from the same page of a Tab Control.

I may have refered to Controls/Indicators moving previously, it should only be Indicators which move.

Gary.

[RavensFan]

These are the exact symptoms you would see if a VI was developed on one PC with an older Windows OS using system fonts, and opened on another PC with a newer OS.

In one case, the new larger font caused the label to grow further to the right and overlap the LED.

In the second case, the array got longer because each item in the array got a little taller, and this effect multiplies as you show more and more elements in the array.  Until finally, the array is much longer than it originally was and overlaps the control you placed below it.

Take a closer look at the system font settings between the two PC's.  Use the LabVIEW .ini file to define a specific font rather than a system font.  Or go through each control and have it be shown in a specific font rather than one of the system fonts.