Definition of 100% scale

I just got a giant monitor, and of course it’s way more productive.

But what does “100%” mean in the lower right of Dorico in Setup, Write and Engrave modes? It’s much smaller than the size of the printed version. Is there a way to set it 100% to full size?

This would help with judging the rastral size, page size, margins, and other global settings, as the monitor could be judged the same distance away as the music stand. Of course, I can figure out the percent for my screen, but was curious if it can be set.

Are you on Mac, of Windows?

Macs originally assumed that screen displays had 72 pixels per inch, which conveniently gave 1 point per pixel. Windows may well have a similar assumption. But of course, the size of pixels got smaller and smaller, which is good for a sharp image, but makes everything tiny. (Hence ‘Retina-scaling’, which doubles the size of everything so it is readable, but using all the pixels, so it’s sharp and HiRes.)

So, HiRes modern displays have a pixel density of around 218 pixels per inch. Divide by 2 for the Retina scaling, and you get 109. 109 as a proportion of 72 gives 1.51, or 151%. That’s what I need to use to get 1 : 1 size on my display.

Some apps can interrogate the OS and the display for the pixel density, so that “Actual Size” is a known value. That may be difficult for Dorico, if the Qt framework, which makes the same code run on both Mac and Windows, doesn’t do this. Or (likely) if Macs and Windows do things differently.

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I’m on Windows 10, the monitor is a Dell 32" (3440 x 1440, 109 pixels per inch). Looks like for my system, 140% is close to life size. So your calculation didn’t quite work for me, but maybe it’s a Windows thing.

All I need is to set scale to 140%, but I was curious what was meant by percentage.

100% doesn’t really mean “the same size as printing it on paper” because factors like variable pixel density etc. quickly come into play.

Evidently, these percentages vary both from screen to screen and from app to app. Therefore I created a .txt file in my “Dorico Projects” folder containing the correct percentages for displaying the document in 1:1 scale compared to the real world for all the permutations of Dorico or Acrobat Reader displayed on either my laptop screen or my separate monitor. The correct values were determined by simply holding an A4 sheet in front of the different screens while the different programs were running and by trial and error adjusting the zoom levels until the size of the document viewed on the screen matched the size of the A4 sheet.