Displays - Apple Mac vs. IBM PC

On Saturday, January 11, 2020 at 7:27:37 PM UTC, Rick C wrote:

> So under Windows 10 is there another way of enlarging all the text in the Diamond display (hopefully along with the size of the fields they are in)?  Using the Windows zoom capability seems to enlarge many things far too much before the Diamond window is large enough. 
> 

I don't know what the answer to this is. The reason why your Mac worked nicely is probably because all your mac apps used point fonts rather than pixel fonts and SVG graphics instead of pngs. So irrespective of DPI, everything's nice and readable. A lot of engineering software on PCs still don't do this, both on Windows and Linux. Windows at least has the scaling setting. I believe some Linux distros have some kind of setting for high DPI screens but the Debian that I'm using now doesn't as far as I know, so I get small graphics/text on my high DPI laptop screen, and there's no easy way that I know of to get round that.

A lot of FPGA tools still need to improve, ie don't use PNGs and don't use pixel fonts, and make use of the DPI settings provided by the host system. Most widget sets provide some sort of support for varying DPI, including QT, Swing and TK.

At least with FPGA tools however you don't _need_ to use the GUI because you can script them. Although then you need to be able to use Tcl and go through their documentation to write the scripts in the first place. Where I've worked, mostly this is how things get done.

FPGA tools can dump out simple scripts for you. I though have some personal scripts (that I don't use at work) here https://www.p-code.org/ttask, and there are similar tools available on github, for example see https://github.com/olofk/fusesoc and https://github.com/olofk/edalize.

You can do some nice things with scripts. For example with ttask for a design I split my testbenches up so each testbench is a subset of all the tests that I need to perform and then I tell the tool which testbenches to run and how many to run concurrently. It's a good way to speed up testbenches because you can get your PC up to 100% load and get your tests done in the shortest time. At home I have the freely available Altera Modelsim And Xilinx XSim, and both of those let you do that.