Screen and content measurements and display

View Designer
 is a WYSIWYG editor. Text and graphics on the screen in
View Designer
 closely resemble what appears on the target HMI device. Screens and their content are measured and displayed in ways that ensure a project can appear on different HMI devices.
Project screens
Project screens are measured by:
  • Pixel dimension.
     Pixel dimension is the number of pixels wide and high for a screen. For example, the 7" PanelView device is 640 wide x 480 pixels high. The density of these pixels is known as DPI (Dots Per Inch). DPI is the number of pixels in a linear inch.
    Screen resolution is also expressed in DPI. For example, the resolution of the 7" PanelView device is 123 DPI.
  • Physical size.
     The physical size of an HMI device screen is usually specified as a diagonal measurement, such as from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. For example, the physical size of the 7" PanelView device is 6.5".
    The HMI device screen can also be measured by the width and height measurements that are more important for motion animation. For example, the 7" PanelView device is 5.20" wide x 3.90" high.
    The proportional relationship between the width and height of a screen is called aspect ratio.
    TIP:
    If you change your monitor resolution, you should restart View Designer
The screens in
View Designer
 measure the same as the screens of the configured HMI device.
This assumes that Windows is calibrated to the DPI of the monitor on which
View Designer
 is running.
For example, the 7" PanelView device is 640 x 480 pixels. To show the screens sized in
View Designer
 with Windows set to 96 DPI, the screens are scaled down to 500 x 375 pixels to represent the 5.20" x 3.90" size.
Text
Text size is typically measured in points, where a point is 1/72 of an inch. This defines the height of the text, but not its width. This means that text width varies slightly on different devices depending on the DPI of the device.
To prevent text from being distorted on screens of varying DPI,
View Designer
 draws the text at the DPI of the target HMI device and sets the width and height based on the number of pixels the text used. Therefore, the X, Y, Width, and Height property values in the
Properties
window are shown in the pixel size they will be drawn on the configured HMI device. The text, including its border, is scaled to the physical size it is on the HMI device. Seeing and measuring the actual size maintains minimum touch areas.
This assumes that Windows is calibrated to the DPI of the monitor on which
View Designer
 is running.
Screen content
Screen content is sized to match the size of the font, so that when a screen is viewed at 100%, the text and elements are the same size as they appear on the HMI device.
Changing the HMI device for a project, and selecting
Do Not Scale
 as a scaling option causes the size and position properties to change to the pixels necessary to maintain the same size. Text width may also change when the DPI changes, so the font point size might also change to keep the text from being clipped.
Changing the HMI device for a project, and selecting a scale mode other than
Do Not Scale
 also changes the size and position properties, including font size. However, this is a relative change, not a physical change. The screen elements take up the same percent of screen space on the new screen as they did on the old screen, but they are now a different physical size and pixel size.
  • The spacing around content within a graphic element may differ on
    View Designer
     screens that are targeted to different HMI devices. This is due to the different HMI devices having different DPI values. However, text wrapping for content within a graphic element is usually the same from
    View Designer
     to an HMI device.
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