Enlarging Block Diagram Icons

[mburns]

Hey all, I'm a student with LabVIEW Full Development System 2009. I've had around 9 month's experience full-time with LabVIEW over a few internships I've done and I come to you with a question that no one seems to be able to answer: How do I make the block diagram icons larger?

At work (using 2010 and later) I've had no problems with the size of the icons, but back at my personal computer the icons (the full icons, mind you) are smaller than my little finger nail. I have good eyes and I can barely read the text from 6 inches away from my monitor. I've read through every topic on here relevent to this and nothing even gives me a place to start.

I can't be the only one to have this problem, so how do I go about enlarging/scaling my block diagram icons? The front panel is better but far from ideal, too.

Thanks,

mburns

[tst]

Short answer - you can't.

Longer answer - LV doesn't support this, but you can use the OS magnifier or a third party program. The one that comes with Windows 7 is decent, but is still not convenient enough for use on a regular basis, at least for me. I enabled the program-specific settings in Windows so that clicking the middle button in LV opens the magnifier automatically, but I still almost never use it.

Longest answer - read this thread - http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Add-a-zoom-function-yes-I-said-zoom-So-sue-me/idi-p/91...

[rolfk]

Another answer: Use a screen with useful pixel resolution!

Macs used to have a very strict limitation as to the screen size and pixel size from requiring a screen to be in a small range of pixel resolutions, eventhough the Quickdraw system had some interesting features that would have allowed more flexibility there. In Windows this limit never existed and you could have either a 640*480 screen on 80 inch, or 1920 * 1080 on 15 inch. That the Windows situation can create abhorable displays since the human eye sensitivity  for fonts, icons and other items do not scale equally, should be rather clear.

Nowadays the modern Mac OS has a much better screen resolution management that allows things like Retina Displays that have an even higher resolution than the actual pixel resolution as seen by the application. Windows doesn't yet have that and I honestly doubt there is a good way to implement the same without making all applications that are not specifically written for such a display interface to look awful. The Windows GDI based screen drawing management is simply to limited to allow for that.

Windows (at least Vista and 7) has some adjustements where you can correct for high resolution screens! You can set the display to be at 100, 125 or 150% of it's normal size. That helps to make things bigger overall, but has abhorable effects on font scaling too, making many user interfaces (not just LabVIEW) cut labels because they don't fit in their allocated space anymore.

Windows is simply not able to allow a decent screen resolution management to make things readable at various pixel resolution and expecting applications to fix that is rather lame.

Full HD resolution on a 15 inch display is simply straining the human eye to now ends.