With high-density displays becoming increasingly popular, some users set their display’s DPI to a higher-than-standard (i.e., >100%) value, in order to compensate for the increased pixel density to achieve readable interfaces. This OS setting tells the running applications that there are fewer visible screen pixels, and these are spread over a larger number of physical pixels. This works well for most cases (at least on recent OSes, it was a bit buggy in non-recet ones). Unfortunately, in some cases we might actually want to know the screen size in physical, rather than logical, pixels. Apparently, Matlab root’s ScreenSize property only reports the logical (scaled) pixel size, not the physical (unscaled) one:
>> get(0,'ScreenSize') % with 100% DPI (unscaled standard) ans = 1 1 1366 768 >> get(0,'ScreenSize') % with 125% DPI (scaled) ans = 1 1 1092.8 614.4
The same phenomenon also affects other related properties, for example MonitorPositions.
Raimund Schlüßler, a reader on this blog, was kind enough to point me to this problem and its workaround, which I thought worthy to share here: To get the physical screen-size, use the following builtin Java command:
>> jScreenSize = java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit.getScreenSize jScreenSize = java.awt.Dimension[width=1366,height=768] >> width = jScreenSize.getWidth width = 1366 >> height = jScreenSize.getHeight height = 768
Also see the related recent article on an issue with the DPI-aware feature starting with R2015b.
Upcoming travels – London/Belfast, Zürich & Geneva
I will shortly be traveling to consult some clients in Belfast (via London), Zürich and Geneva. If you are in the area and wish to meet me to discuss how I could bring value to your work, then please email me (altmany at gmail):
- Belfast: Nov 28 – Dec 1 (flying via London)
- Zürich: Dec 11-12
- Geneva: Dec 13-15
