Set DPI of individual applications in Windows

Solution 1:

Is it possible to set the DPI of individual applications in Windows?

In a word, no.

It's a global setting.

Solution 2:

Yes! It can be done. You can change the DPI setting of an individual application in Windows, but only if it supports it. You can do this in the following way.

If you have a few specific applications that support high DPI settings, but don’t indicate it, you can configure that detail manually. To do so, right-click the shortcut that starts the application (in the Start menu) and choose Properties. On the Compatibility tab, enable the option named Disable Display Scaling on High DPI Settings. If you have a lot of applications to configure, this gets tiring fast.

Note: This will work just fine with Windows Vista and Windows 7 don't know about Windows XP.

Solution 3:

Here's a technique that may indirectly address your need. In Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 there is a possibility to enable dpi scaling for old applications written before high-resolution screens appeared. Windows will make an application believe it's drawing on a low-dpi screen and will take care of scaling the entire window for the application, so that the result shows large enough on a high-dpi screen. This will be bitmap scaling, no vector, so expect some blurring as a consequence.

You will need to enable one key in registry, then supply an XML manifest file for each application you want to scale. A good tutorial on this is How to Fix App Scaling Surface Pro 4 + Other High DPI Displays .

Here comes the important section of the external manifest posted in the YouTube video description:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
  <asmv3:application>
    <asmv3:windowsSettings xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">
      <ms_windowsSettings:dpiAware xmlns:ms_windowsSettings="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">false</ms_windowsSettings:dpiAware>
    </asmv3:windowsSettings>
  </asmv3:application>
</assembly>

And here comes the the .reg file content that activates external manifest files:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide]
"PreferExternalManifest"=dword:00000001

Solution 4:

SOLUTION FOR WINDOWS 10 in high resolution PCs.

Right click on the software icon/link > properties > tab "compatibility"> change high DPI setting > mark the checkbox "override high DPI scaling behavior"> select "system" in the window below (the default is "application")