I have a 17 inch monitor but several users only have 14 inch monitors.
How do I develop on a screen larger than what the app will be run on?
How do I tell what the screens will look like on a smaller monitor?  Any
info on this would be greatly appreciated.

That's the problem many us are facing, fancy 17"..21" monitors with
resolutions up to 1600x1200.  And then some customers have those old
640x480 VGA-screens. And because they are customers, they'll easily
beat us with their antique tubes.

So, you better just start designing all your Forms in 640x480 mode. That's
the only working method that quarantees that forms will look good on
that mode, and usually are usable with higher resolutions also.

This company promises to take this screen size load off your back
http://www.genotechs.com/products.html  But what I have heard, even it
would not be very good in downgrading the forms from high resolutions.

Markku Nevalainen

news:7o77b2$mmq10@forums.borland.com...

Also, if you want a form to fit inside the main form, make it no larger than
the client area......

This proved to not be as difficult as I thought it would be. I program in
1024 x 768 resolution. (There is something about seeing more code at once
that turns me on.) I then supply an option in the program setup form to
stretch forms to proper scale if the user desires this. Some users like to
be able to read the print from across the room. In each form's OnCreate
method, I put a simple test for this option and if set, I adjust the form's
ScaleBy value by the difference in screen resolution from a 640 x 480
standpoint.

var
  Percent : real;
begin
  if SetupData.FormSizerOn and (Screen.Width<>640) then
  begin
    Percent:=Round(((Screen.Width-640)/640)*100)+100;
    ScaleBy(Percent,100);
  end
.
.
  The only problem that I have had to overcome was in the way that TDBGrids
(and other grids I presume) resize their columns In order to compensate, I
first loop through each tdbgrid on the form and store their column widths.
Then, after calculating the Percent of scale, I use that as the multiplier
to reset the column widths by. So far, this seems to work fine for me. Also,
remember to always use scalable fonts (TT fonts).

Having to keep up with two versions of the same form is a pain in the ......
I am doing that in an app because I went from a scrolling form from D1
origins to a TTabSheet and so now the client likes both screens and wants to
switch between them at will. So I now have to make exactly the same code
changes to two versions of the form.

Anyway, good luck. I just thought I'd throw in some opinion for
thought......

Woody

Dear Rhea,

Limit your forms to Width: 640 and Height 480.

Also place your forms on the upper left part of any high-res monitor you are
developing on in case you left the Position property of the form to its
default which is poDesigned. Doing otherwise will cause the form to go
outside to the right of the screen area of low-res displays.

This does not answer your question entirely since you may want to develop
applications for different screen resolutions. I've read some articles on
this but they are (for me) a bit esoteric: managing parts of your form via
panels resizing depending on the resolution.

I'm wondering and I haven't done this yet, is it too much if we design two
versions of forms to cover high and low resolutions? Designing for the
lowest common denominator distorts the app's appearance in high-end
displays. And to think that the LCD is not a monochrome (though with
greyscale) monitor.

I've seen the bundled InstallShield with Delphi only having one page for the
high-res and two for the low. But it can be done with a simple if and may
not be applicable for complex forms.

Any thoughts?

Edgar D. Jordan
sp...@k-net.edu