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Superfreak3
Level 11

Dialog Image Distortion...

Hi All,

We usually replace some theme images with company specific images - Welcome & Banner.jpg, setup.gif. This has been fine in the past, but for some reason our Welcome.jpg image is giving us problems on some systems. I've attached an image illustrating our issue.

For some reason, some of the yellow circles are clipped at the top. It's weird because the top-most circle is fine. I initially thought that maybe there was some dialog control overlapping, but when I checked all controls on the Welcome dialog, that area looked clear of any interference.

On Windows 10 and Server 2012 systems the image looks fine. I believe on most earlier OSs, we see the clipped circles. The resolution is set the same in both good and bad scenarios.

Also, the different format setup.gif looks fine in all cases when displayed while unpacking the .msi.

Does anyone have any ideas what this might be?

Any thoughts much appreciated!!
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joshstechnij
Level 10 Flexeran
Level 10 Flexeran

If this is a Basic MSI project, the image rendering used by the Windows Installer UI image controls seems to have issues dealing with images larger than the control size. When the image is scaled to fit the control, however MSI renders the image scaled down seems to be poorly implemented. We noticed rather awful image rendering with 200% image assets particularly on Windows 7 or older versions of Windows. The image rendering seemed to improve with Windows 8 or 8.1.

Since the user interface for Basic MSI projects is implemented by the Windows Installer, there's very little control you have over how an image looks at runtime. We found the best solution was to provide 100% scale images (for 96 DPI) as the blurry look of images scaled up on higher DPI machines was more acceptable than the scaled down images.

Note that setup.gif is displayed by our setup.exe code and is not subject to the rendering issues with the Windows Installer.
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Superfreak3
Level 11

joshstechnij wrote:
If this is a Basic MSI project, ...


Yes, this is a Basic MSI project.

So you're saying the problem may be or may be improved by our image files?

I believe I saw a image specification doc somewhere I guess I'll hunt for that. Else, I can grab one of the canned InstallShield dialog theme images and ensure our customized images fall in line.
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joshstechnij
Level 10 Flexeran
Level 10 Flexeran

Changing the images might be able to improve the situation on down-level platforms where they look distorted. If MSI doesn't need to change the size of the image for the area being drawn that is the most likely option to work (specifically, needing to draw an image that is larger than the dialog area it will exist in is the biggest cause of unacceptable image distortion). So if you have an image control that is 48x48 pixels, an image size of 48x48 pixels would likely work best (note that dialog controls are actually measured in MSI dialog units, which unfortunately complicates matters; see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa369490(v=vs.85).aspx for more info).

You can look at the welcome.jpg and banner.jpg images in \Program Files\InstallShield\2015\Support\Themes\InstallShield Blue Theme for the common image sizing. Note that welcome.jpg is a bit odd in that it covers the whole dialog and the text controls are drawn on top of it.

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