viewing VASSAL/VASL on a high-resolution screen

Technical Support & Bugs
1

I just bought a MS Surface Book 2 and a 4K monitor. When I open VASL/VASSAL the font size is very tiny. I can barely read it. When I change the screen resolution the VASL window size/shape changes a bit, but the font remains miniscule. This problem occurs on both the Surface Book screen and the Samsung U28E590D monitor.

How can I enlarge the VASSAL/VASL font size to make the program usable?

2

I am not sure whether that is a VASSAL problem. If MS couples font size to screen pixels I think that is the big mistake - text size is normally defined as points (which usually means multiples of 1/72"), not as a size in “that many pixels”. I would look for a setting on the MS system to change display size.
Otherwise it would mean that the font used by VASSAL is broken, e. g. that it only has a “screen” definition in pixel size, not an analytic description.

3

That’s probably not the problem given the solution I was pointed to (link below). Adjusting some of the settings in the VASSAL properties fixed it. Thanks, anyway!

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vassalengine.org%2Fforum%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D3%26t%3D9436&h=ATOGfhNTWA8hg8THozuwdR5iT_Gz0Iw_lfS7Q5CqaNC_kptNU7BHUs_SCr8alPa2cdBBbNR5PeN-6mYwF9eiHL5yE3U6LsfQYYKR541LK-aXNos1KPJ8snjcaTsdZW-jgHoeH94kH9la

4

I’ve read that Java 9 might do the right thing for high-DPI displays. Has anybody tried running with Java 9?

5

Someone tried OpenJDK 9 and it crashed:

www.vassalengine.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10473

6

Tried the fix described on Facebook, but didn’t work. I suspect it’s because I’m running Win7. Here and there the fix refers to Win10. And several of the steps the fix mentions do not appear on Win7.

So, I’m still stuck with tiny fonts.

7

Windows 10, OpenJDK11 seemed to work well for high DPI.
I used a slightly different solution to the XML library issue described here
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10714&start=15
but other than that was nice and normal sized.

8

Thus spake zgrose via messages:

Windows 10, OpenJDK11 seemed to work well for high DPI.
I used a slightly different solution to the XML library issue described
here
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10714&start=15[1]

Would you please describe what that solution was?

–
J.

9

I happened to drop xercesImpl-2.9.1.jar and xml-apis-2.9.1.jar (maybe I removed something else as well, I already deleted that VM) to address the error:
2019-01-13 15:03:31,127 [1-AWT-EventQueue-0] ERROR VASSAL.tools.ErrorDialog -
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/w3c/dom/ls/DocumentLS