VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 07 2019 - 10:34:04 CST

Hi,
  You'll find that a few plugins won't work correctly due to changes
in Tk 8.6, but we're working on updating those that are affected.

The issues with use of the retina displays hinge upon the support in the
latest FLTK and Tk implementations. FLTK versions >= 1.3.5 now have hooks to
enable OpenGL use of the full native resolution display with the use of
some MacOS-specific APIs, but this has no impact on the display of GUI
widgets GUI text labels, menus, etc. I'm not sure if FLTK 1.4.x has
gone further here or not:
  https://www.fltk.org/doc-1.3/osissues.html#osissues_macos

For Tk, the retina issues seem to be more problematic as I haven't
(yet) found any deep discussion of these problems even now,
several years after the introduction of the first retina hardware.
Some people have done work to make resizable widgets, which is important,
but the various plugins in VMD use a huge variety of GUI widgets and
I'm sure that the coverage of resizable widgets falls far short of
what the VMD plugins are already using currently. There's at least
some useful discussion here:
  https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/High+Resolution+Displays
  https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/User+Interface+Design%3A+Sizing+of+Elements

The release notes for Tcl/Tk 8.5.16 list improved retina support
as a feature, but I have no idea what this really means:
  https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Changes+in+Tcl%2FTk+8.5.16
I also saw this discussion that looks somewhat interesting also,
I haven't tried hacking the .app bundle Plist files yet:
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12318172/show-images-using-python-tkinter-on-scaled-e-g-retina-displays

Best,
  John

On Sat, Dec 07, 2019 at 02:32:21PM +0100, FX wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have updated the build, at the same URL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/700vi9kkpglf6m6/VMD%201.9.4a38.zip?dl=0
> The new build should have all plugins working, no more warnings and missing plugins.
>
> Remaining issue: VMD is working in low-resolution on ???Retina??? displays. This affects the OpenGL window, as well as all interface elements (menus, text, etc.). This is particularly difficult for extension windows, whose text is smaller and where the low-res version is hard to read.
>
> Best regards,
> FX
>
> --
> Dr. François-Xavier Coudert
> Senior Researcher / Directeur de Recherche
> CNRS, PSL University, Chimie ParisTech
> Webpage: https://www.coudert.name/
> 

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/