When "use large fonts" parts of screens are missing.

Question

I see an number of posts about "use large fonts", some going back years.  Are they ever going to "Fix" it.  For instance when Edit preferences and am using "large fonts" I can't see the "ok / cancel" buttons at the bottom and "cancel" is the default.  So it took me awhile to figure out why my changes to preferences weren't being saved because I would just hit enter which "canceled my changes".  Other screens like printing work fine without being to see those options.

UKR · Answer

Font size problems? Display issues? (Windows)

If you haven't rebooted Windows since the installation of the latest Quicken update, please do that first and try Quicken again.

Still not any better?

Please try the following procedure:

- Close and exit Quicken!!! (This process won't work while Quicken is running!)

- Check the Compatibility tab settings in your Quicken Desktop program icon:

- In the Windows Start Menu right-click the Quicken icon. Select "Open File Location". This brings up a Windows File Explorer window. Right-click the highlighted Quicken shortcut line item.

or

- Go to the traditional Windows Desktop and right-click the Quicken program icon.

or

- Use Windows File Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\ and right-click qw.exe

- Now click Properties.

- Select the Compatibility tab.

- Uncheck all settings.

- Windows 7, 8.1: Check "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings".

- Windows 10, 11: Click "Change high DPI settings".

- Check "Override high DPI scaling behavior. Scaling performed by:" and select "Application" (also try the other available options repeating the entire procedure!). Click OK.

Users with high resolution monitors, 3840x2160 with 225% scaling, try "System (Enhanced)"

- Be sure to uncheck the "Run this program in compatibility mode for [older Windows version]" setting.

- Click the "Change settings for all users" button.

- Click Apply and exit.

- Reboot Windows.

- Now start Quicken and see if that makes a difference.

Some additional tuning suggestions:

- Ensure that you have the latest available display, monitor or graphics device drivers for Windows installed. The version that came with the Windows installation material may not be up to date.

- System requirements: 1024x768 or higher screen resolution, 1280x1024 minimum for Large Fonts settings

- Unless absolutely required, try not to use "View / Use large fonts"

- Try setting the bank account registers to use a different font style or size: go to Edit / Preferences / Register, click the Fonts button and try different fonts.

- Try adjusting the bank account registers' row height: go to Edit / Preferences / Register, choose among the available Row Height choices: Compact, Comfortable or Standard

- If all else fails, try changing Windows Control Panel / Display options for "Make text and other items … smaller or larger" to use a different scaling level, but try not to exceed 125%

- Try using the Windows Magnifier. Press the Windows logo key and the = key to open Magnifier. Customize Magnifier to increment Zoom in 25% intervals.

Also try "dark mode" by using inverted colors.

Quicken Kristina · Answer

Hello @Scooterlam,

Thank you for letting us know about this issue! I was able to replicate it and forwarded it to the proper channels for further investigation and resolution. If you would like to contribute to the investigation, please navigate to Help>Report a Problem and send a problem report with log files attached.

Thank you!

(CTP-18175)

Chris_QPW · Answer

This problem always breaks down to these causes.

* User doesn't understand how scaling works and how it fits into Quicken requirements for display.  Large Fonts is window scaling of about 1.25.  And if the user is using Windows scaling that adds to this.  And I have never seen a case where in the horizontal direction so I will only talk about the vertical requirement.  It is 768 when you have large fonts off and Windows scaling at 100% and 1024 with large fonts on and Windows scaling 100%.  For 1024/768 you get 1.3333 which shows this ratio, but I believe the large font scaling is a bit lower at 1.25.  If you add in say 150% Windows scaling you just asked for 1.5 enlargement and as  such you need the number of the vertical pixies to go by that amount.  The reason these requirements are there in the first place is because in lots of places Quicken uses fixed size dialogs.  For any fixed size the developers have choose a size that will allow fitting in all the controls and as such have to pick a size that will also fit on a "reasonable size display"(I "virtual pixels" If you have a line that is one pixel wide and the user scales it up to twice the size then you need two raw pixels for that line.)  A lot of the problem could be eliminated by making all the dialogs that aren't tiny messages into variable sized, but that is more work.
* @Scooterlam's example is a bit different.  In places in the Lifetime Planner, Tax Planner, and in Business forms these where created when Microsoft was into "the desktop is the web" and it wanted all desktop application to become "web pages".  It is a dark time I remember when just going to a different screen might get you a 401 page not found error because you downloaded an updated version of IE and the pages done this way were using IE to render them in the background.  So, these are still embedded web pages with backend library rendering that have no options for scaling.  This can also be expressed in other areas as "not all part of Quicken understand scaling or when they do they scale in a different way than the rest of Quicken".  Large fonts was actually created before Windows had scaling at the operating system level.  And these days it really makes fixing scaling even harder for the developers.

So that leaves only workarounds.  I will leave it to others to post them since I don't have a link for them handy, but one will find that what works for some people doesn't work for others and some might even cause more problems.  The first think I would suggest though is to make sure you aren't violating the Quicken min display requirements.  I know for old eyes one might want to try make things bigger than Quicken is designed for but it is probably a losing battle.  Maybe try Windows magnifier or getting a larger display or something like that.

EDIT I'm going to add a bit to this. For dialogs not fitting, I'm 99% sure the problem is that you have exceeded the min display requirement.  For problems like @Scooterlam posted that is caused by the fact that not all parts of Quicken are scaling properly which is different.  This is the one that can sometimes be tweaked around because Windows has different settings for scaling that can affect different controls differently and sometimes you can find a combination that works.