Monday, March 27, 2017

GanttProject 2.8.4: scalable UI on high-density screens and bugfixes

We released GanttProject 2.8.4 which greatly improves UI scalability on high-density devices such as MacBook with Retina screen and Windows Surface Pro.

DPI option in GanttProject settings is now considered in the most major aspects of the user interface, including toolbar buttons and milestones and arrow shapes on the chart. This means that the whole application can be scaled by a simple change of DPI value in the settings.

The absolute majority of the users should be happy with the default value of 96. Those who use high-density displays are advised to set the value to something close to the real DPI of their screens. Values in the range 150-220 shall be good.

We recommend to set Normal size of Application and Base chart fonts and adjust them only for fine tuning. Bigger DPI value and smaller application font size may produce good results in some use cases.

Settings dialog with DPI option

Changing DPI option is safe: it only linearly scales fonts and graphics in GanttProject and doesn't affect operating system or Java Runtime. However, we recommend to restart GanttProject after changing DPI option value.

In unfortunate case when fonts appear so small that it is hard even to change the DPI value, one can edit the settings file manually. The settings file is named .ganttproject (note the leading dot, such files may be hidden by the operating system) and it sits in the user home folder. It is a text file which can be edited in any text editor. Adding this line between any other option tags will set DPI to 120:

<option id="ui.screenDpi" value="120"/>
 
You need to close all GanttProject windows before editing the settings file.

Besides the scalability, GanttProject 2.8.4 fixes a few bugs and gets back iCal import plugin.



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