MicroStation, InRoads and AECOsim BD with UHD and Windows 8.1 or 10
UHD, High DPI, high resolution, 4K, DPI Scaling, dpiAware, side-by-side configuration, manifest, AutoCAD,
If you have display with very high resolution, ultra HD (UHD), or 4K, you may encounter an issue where dpi scaling does not adjust properly with certain applications. Tools and dialog boxes may be too small to work with. To resolve this, you can manually lower your display’s resolution, but then why have an Ultra HD monitor at all? To resolve this issue for specific applications, you can set them to prefer an external manifest file and use this to set the dpiAware value to false.
I’ve attached files for MicroStation SS3, InRoads, AECOsim BD SS5, and AutoCAD 2014 with quick instructions for MicroStation SS3:
1. Run/merge the attached HKLM_SideBySide_ExternalManifest.reg registry file
This will add the following key to your registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide]
"PreferExternalManifest"=dword:00000001
2. Copy the attached _SS3_Ustation.exe.manifest file to the same location as your MicroStation SS3 ustation.exe file. Rename this file to be Ustation.exe.manifest.
3. Restart your computer and simply run MicroStation as you normally would.
For more detailed information, you need to acquire the manifest information from specific application’s .EXE file. To do this, you can use a program called Resource Hacker. This program allows you to extract the manifest information of certain application resource files such as .EXE, .DLL, etc. Once you have the manifest information, you can copy/paste this in to a text file with the same name as the .EXE and include a .manifest at the end of the file. In the external mainfest file, change the dpiAware setting to false such as <dpiAware>false</dpiAware>. I’ve attached manifest files for AECOsimBD SS5 and AutoCAD 2014. InRoads SS2 and SS3 use the same Ustation.exe as MicroStation so nothing else needs to be done for InRoads to work with this setting.
Additional information can be found at http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-fix-apps-that-look-small-on-high-dpi-and-high-resolution-displays/
Ultra HD DPI Manifests.zip