VCL Form Designer Zoom

[TaKo91 0]

I have a VCL form of width 1920px and height of 1080px. To put the elements on the form I have to scroll the form left, right and up, down as it does not fit in the window.

Is it possible to zoom out the form in form designer so it fits the main window? I see there is option to zoom in/zoom out in code editor but not in Form designer.

[dummzeuch 1453]

There is no such option.

[FPiette 373]

Using latest Delphi (12.1), you can open a new edit window (right click on the tab and select "New edit window". Then in the window which is opened, you see your source code and you can switch to design mode by clicking on "design" tab located bottom right of the edit window. Now, you see the form editor. It is still embedded in the designer window but it is bigger than in the main IDE window yet still not full screen.

 

You can enter a feature request in Embarcadero Quality Portal. If you do, publish the reference here.

[Der schöne Günther 310]

I remember this being the first question I posted, back in 2013, when I first started with Delphi 🥲

 

I couldn't believe there was no such thing, so I asked.

[Uwe Raabe 1970]

Scaling forms is always problematic. We can see this every day with applications (not only Delphi ones) when used in a mixed DPI environment.

 

Although I don't actually suggest to use it, there is an option to switch the form designer using a special PPI. The drawback is that it is used for all forms and not only for the large ones.

 

Naively thinking that scaling the form display could easily be done by drawing onto a bitmap and simply display that downscaled, but that would imply that the whole user interaction has to be made with a bitmap instead of real controls. The effort to implement that with all its edge cases is way more than one would expect.

[A.M. Hoornweg 138]

You could put a tScrollbox on your form and put the rest of your components on top of that.  The scrollbox can be larger than the form itself and you can simply use the scrollbars to scroll the components into view.

[Uwe Raabe 1970]

1 hour ago, A.M. Hoornweg said:

you can simply use the scrollbars to scroll the components into view.

You can as well simply scroll the form as needed, but the need to scroll was exactly the complaint.