Hallo,
on my Surface Pro i had a problem with font scaling on worshelf if tabs not part of the body. It stays on a fix font-size value. The tab font scaling is fine if tabs part of the body. The icons for settings and collapse are much to small.

Is there an workaround ... i can post the skin if needed.

If i wakeup the device workshelf is unresponsable for 2-5 min. Could this be the usb mount problem - i have a sdcard as drive mounted.

Not sure I understand what you mean by 'tabs not part of the body'. If you could post a screenshot here displaying the problem I would appreciate it (or perhaps two, one with this happening, another without it happening).



Hmmm, full DPI support was only added recently and, unfortunately, there is no simple way to solve this.

On systems with high DPI settings - and provided the 'Disable Shelf scaling on high DPI settings' option is not checked (Preferences -> General -> More Options) - the size of the text/fonts in the Shelf will be scaled up automatically, but NOT the size of the Shelf icons.

This is by design so that when the user selects a specific icon size for the Shelf that is exactly the size he gets and not some automatically scaled up value (which would thus make it impossible to select an icon size that is *really* 16x16 pixels). The same is true for icons on docks.

Note that currently, regardless of DPI settings, the actual *vertical* size of the tabs does NOT change, only the size of the text describing the tab names.

This is because the tabs section is made by fixed height bitmaps which were never intended by the person who made the theme to be resized/scaled up vertically. Having the application scale those bitmaps automatically on systems with high DPI settings could break the theme (things might not align correctly or the tabs could become distorted).

Along the same lines, the skinner also assumed that the icons/symbols for settings and collapse would always be 16x16 pixels in size. Again, changing that could have unintended visual consequences.

This said, there are still some rough edges that need to be taken care of regarding high DPI support, so I will look further into this in the future.



Ok, this seems to be a problem on Surface Pro devices (please see THIS post). One more glitch to add to the list of glitches (not Winstep related) that Surface Pro machines have.

Unfortunately, since this seems to be a problem restricted to Surface Pros, the only way to figure out exactly what is going on is to get my hands on one of those.

Some years ago I had to buy a Logitech web cam to figure out what was causing an issue on systems with Logitech web cams (turns out it was a bug in the Logitech Control Panel applet software). Unfortunately, unlike a web cam, a Surface Pro is not exactly a cheap investment (and I don't need another laptop, thanks).

on my SurfacePro i change my Font size to 48 nothing happens



TabsPartOfBody False no fontscaling (fontscaling1)


TabsPartOfBody True fontscaling (fontscaling2)


Is ther any way to make the tabs fit the size of the text alement with an equal left right padding?

Thanks for your answer

On that last note, a long time ago I had proposed another option concerning the tab width: set the width of all tabs to the width of the tab with the longest label (for uniformity), and make it work in all shelf layouts -- either "small" (centred, left or right-justified) or spanning the whole shelf width, adding transparent space between them as needed.
I'd like to re-instate my suggestion herewith.

Ditto, same dpi and shelf tabs fonts issues. Thx for explanation.

The Shelf automatically 'crops' the font size to the maximum font size that will fit vertically in the tab. It does not increase the vertical tab size to fit the text, it does the opposite.

So i had to increase the vertical tab size or the image size to get an bigger font size?

You have to increase the TabHeight value.

Hmmmm, is TabHeight an accessible variable somewhere? Don't recall seeing it.

For the tab height issue, in my case, it sufficed to locate the templates and modify the graphics to fix the appearance issue (i.e. text fitting and aligned in tab).

on my desktop pc selcting a bigger font results in a bigger font the tabheigt is scaling

on my surface selcting a bigger font results in a nothing, selcting a tabheigh value of 96 results in a bigger tabwidth? - and the font size is anywhere limited to an fixed value (HDPI scaling?).

For the record, same experience on Surface Pro 4, i.e. changing font size for shelf tabs results in no visual change in font size. However, style changes (bold, etc) do appear.

For background, since getting the SP4 I've frequently run into problems with font sizes for some/many apps. Has something to do with the high dpi of the SP4 screen and Win10 not providing proper scaling options (other than reduce resolution). Usually fonts are way too small on the SP4 for many apps. Just waiting for the "anniversary" release in July, hoping for improvement.

Ok, I'll try to explain this again.

There are user settings and skinning settings.

A long time ago the GUI interface included both, but when the UI was revamped the skinning settings were removed because very few people actually make skins I wanted to cut down on interface clutter for the other users.

The plan was to transfer those skinning settings to a separate application (as it is happening now with the Winstep Theme Builder) but that ended up being put on hold for a very long time.

Skinners are used to edit theme configuration files directly, so the Winstep Theme Builder was never much of a priority.

The vertical size of tabs, tab font size, etc, are all theme settings and are dependent on the size of the bitmaps used for a particular theme, etc...

For convenience sake, I added the ability to change fonts for most elements in a theme to the UI, but those changes are still subject to the current theme constraints, i.e.; when a Skinner makes a theme, he has specific fonts and font sizes in mind. The bitmaps he makes and font sizes he uses are meant to fit those initial specifications.

So, you can't just change the size of a font from 11 points to 48 points and expect a huge change like that not to break a theme. To minimize the chances of that actually happening, for tabs in the Shelf the font size is limited to what will actually fit on the tab, otherwise the text would simply 'spill over' to the Shelf body.

So, if the skinner made tabs that were meant to be used with Tahoma at 11 point size (but the tab themselves are still able to accommodate a maximum font size of 16 points), setting the size of the font to 48 points or 128 points will have no effect because the font size will still be limited to the maximum that that tab bitmap can hold: 16 points, in this example.

The tab bitmap cannot be vertically stretched to accommodate any font size, no matter how large, so the only other alternative is to limit the maximum font size displayed by the tabs.

As for the 'TabHeight' setting mentioned above, he was referring to a setting in the theme's text configuration files (which, as I said above, are not available from the UI).

Now, to make this absolutely clear, the above is all unrelated to system DPI settings.