Force enable Display Scaling on High Resolution(4k) screens

Otto42 · Post by **Otto42** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 4:11 pm

As we all know, Textpad is fundamentally broken when it comes to Hi DPI screens. My recent laptop has a 15 inch screen that runs at 3840x2160. Way higher than the 96 DPI.

Textpad looks so bad because Helios has incorrectly marked the application as "dpiAware" in the manifest. They did this to prevent the text from looking "blurry" when Windows 8/10 scales the application, however they failed to follow it up and actually scale the rest of the application. The icons are all broken, as are most of the dialog boxes. It basically makes the application unusable.

You can fix this yourself, however the fix will make the text ever so slightly blurry. If that doesn't bother you, then here's how to do it:

1. Download CFF Explorer from this page:
http://www.ntcore.com/exsuite.php

The file you want is CFF Explorer (x86 Version, stand-alone, Zip Archive). You don't need the full suite.

2. Extract that into a directory, and run CFF Explorer.exe.

3. Go into your Textpad directory, and make a backup copy of the Textpad.exe file. You're going to modify this file with CFF Explorer.

4. Open the Textpad.exe file in CFF Explorer. At the bottom of the list, you'll see "Resource Editor". Click that.

5. Look for Configuration Files in the new list, and pick the one labeled simply "1". The content of that will be shown on the right. It should look like the following:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">...

And so on. In here you will find this line:

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<dpiAware xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">true</dpiAware>

You cannot actually edit this file directly. Instead, right click the label "1" for that file, and select "Save Resource (Raw)". This will let you save this particular configuration file out somewhere else, like your desktop.

6. After you have saved the resource file, go edit it. You can use Textpad for this. Simply change the "true" to a "false" here, and save the file back.

7. Back in CFF Explorer, right click the label "1" again, and this time select "Replace Resource (Raw)", and then select your modified file. It will load it up and change this resource to have the new file.

8. Finally, use CFF Explorer's File->Save As function to save the new modified Textpad.exe. You probably can't save it into the existing Program Files directory because of Administrator permissions. Save it to your desktop, and then move it into that directory. Make sure your backup copy remains behind, just in case.

When you run the modified Textpad.exe file now, Windows should see that it does not support hi-dpi screens, and so it will turn on the display scaling, making it look normal, albeit slightly blurry. Decide if you like having the toolbars and dialogs look normal is worth the blurriness to you. If not, simply delete the modified exe file and put your backup copy back in place.

Hopefully Textpad gets an update to fix this issue rather than having to just force enable display scaling. For me, having close buttons that I can actually click on properly is worth the blur.