Terrain viewer issue with Ease of Access settings

[Boyd]

Wow - that totally fixed it! Congratulations!!!

Guess I was actually on the right track with the graphics settings. So, this is what was happening. For some odd reason, changing the text size had the effect of zooming in on everything. The elevation data is contained in .png files that are loaded into a special kind of window called a "canvas" which is hidden from the user. Even so, it was getting zoomed, which I didn't expect. But that caused you to only see part of the image, and the zooming also added artifacts to the original image files. Those artifacts were creating the "contour lines" and "spikes" that you saw.

Phew! Now, the question is, does changing that text setting cause some other problems for you?

 

[bobpbx]

Wow - that totally fixed it! Congratulations!!!

Guess I was actually on the right track with the graphics settings. So, this is what was happening. For some odd reason, changing the text size had the effect of zooming in on everything. The elevation data is contained in .png files that are loaded into a special kind of window called a "canvas" which is hidden from the user. Even so, it was getting zoomed, which I didn't expect. But that caused you to only see part of the image, and the zooming also added artifacts to the original image files. Those artifacts were creating the "contour lines" and "spikes" that you saw.

Phew! Now, the question is, does changing that text setting cause some other problems for you?

Yes, on this monitor the text is very small when the slider is all the way on the left. So I plan to inch it along the scale until I reach the best tradeoff.

 

[Boyd]

There won't be any "tradeoff" if you use that setting. It will always corrupt the elevation data unless you use the default. Also, it undoubtedly has an effect on the elevation readings that are shown in the in the top left box in the main boydsmaps app. Furthermore, the "PinesXT" app also is based on data encoded as RGB values for everything. So you will get more errors there too. Now, PinesXT has some built-in error checking that may suppress the errors so you might not see them, but it will make the app less responsive and reduce the accuracy.

Can you accomplish the same thing by changing settings for text sizes in Windows Explorer and the other apps that you use? In Edge, you could set different zoom settings for different sites, or maybe just make the default to be zoomed in but make my sites(s) 100%? Another approach might be to create a separate user account with the non-zoomed settings and use it on my site. There's a way to quickly switch between accounts on Windows (I think).

Anyway, there really won't be a "good tradeoff" for that setting in the terrain viewer. Any scaling of the screen will change the image size and create artifacts that change everything. For example, if you look at the elevation range that is shown on the left as a little "rainbow" graph, those numbers are going to be wrong whenever the screen is scaled and that will affect everything.

I will research this some more, there might be a way I can force the hidden images not to change scale, although I'm not sure how.

 

[Boyd]

I don't really see a way to override the user zoom settings in the app. I tried setting it to a 125% zoom in the Edge appearance settings and it created the exact same problems you had - "contour line" errors, didn't show the whole map, etc.

But this works - I can set 125% page zoom for all site in the Edge appearance settings

Then, I go to my site and while viewing it, manually set the zoom down to 100% here:

That will cause a custom zoom setting only for my site, which is shown in the Edge appearance settings

This fixes the problem. But that only affects Edge, and not other apps that you might want to zoom. If you are using the global "text size" zoom setting at 125%, that changes everything. However, it might work if you set a custom zoom of 80% for my site only. Theoretically, that would cancel out the global setting - in other words, 1.25 x 0.80 = 1.00. You could try setting it like this, I have not confirmed that this works however. It might make things worse if it first stretches everything and then shrinks it!

[edit] Forget all of this and just use the technique I describe below!

 

[Boyd]

I think this might work though. Instead of changing text size, try changing the resolution of the monitor to a lower value. That should make everything bigger and *might* not create the problem with my site (not sure). What other resolutions can you pick from the menu? Something around 2560 x 1080 might give a similar effect to making the text size 25% larger.

[edit] Use the technique described in my next post, it should accomplish everything you need.

 

[Boyd]

OK, I think I have the easiest solution to fix this for you. I went to "Ease of Access" settings and zoomed the text size up to 125% - that's the way you had it set, right? Make sure the zoom is set exactly to 125%.

Now, in Edge, I went to my website and zoomed down to 80% under the three-dot menu

That automatically created an 80% zoom setting only for my website. You should see that under the Appearance settings in Edge.

The 80% setting there cancels out the system-wide 125% text setting, but only on my site. As far as I can tell, that fixes the problem while preserving the setting you prefer elsewhere. Give it a try....

 

[bobpbx]

Excellent Mr. Boyd, worked like a charm. Thanks for your help on this.