CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Am I the only one who thinks that crossover looks anaemic on a retina display? I am having problems reading the menus for MS office, for example. V. grey and washed-out. I also have problems with descenders in certain (unpredictable) letters which seem to be randomly thickened.

When you wrote this, you were aware that you are running windows applications which were never planned to run on retina displays right?

Being a Linux user, I can't really confirm the problem on retina displays. That being said, I would believe that there aren't that many retina displays attached to windows computers, and therefore, not many softwares planned with such a display in mind. In other words, Crossover is not entirely responsible for how your application will look on your screen, the application being ran shares a significant part of responsibility regarding its own display.

So not only are you running software never planned for your OS, you are also running software on a display that wasn't planned for either. Although I'm sure Codeweaver is doing their best to procure you with the best experience, I would not be surprised such situations might escape their means. Since the software you are running is at least partly responsible, Codeweavers might not be able to solve every problems on the display.

This is not do the appologies for Codeweavers, but I'm thinking that you might not appreciate the complexity of the problem, notably MS Office. Since MS Office is obviously proprietary, Codeweavers possibly can't change certain behaviors which are inappropriate for a retina display on OSX. Things might stil work on Windows + bootcamp, but you are removing one difficulty, since Windows itself would be running the software. Just to drive the point home, I believe that even Windows needs an adendum so as to fully use a retina display.

That being said, if the problem persists across many softwares, I would still invite you to file a support ticket, as there might still be a solution.

I believe in theory we can do something about it. Some Windows software is high DPI capable. If you run Windows (Or CrossOver on Linux) on a Retina mac and set the DPI to ~200 (actual value depends on the screen), a lot of application show up fine. I think newer Microsoft Office versions should work ok.

OSX uses its own 2:1 scaling for applications that don't announce themselves as high dpi capable. So Microsoft Word in CrossOver renders with 96 DPI and OSX up-scales it. CrossOver currently does not read the high dpi aware flag in Windows applications and thus doesn't forward it to OSX. I don't know the precise details of what kind of changes are required to fix this.

There's one issue that makes things more complicated: The Windows and Linux approach to high DPI displays does not work well with Multi-Monitor setups where one monitor has a high resolution and the other doesn't. The OSX approach makes this work for 2:1 scaling. The drawback is that the OSX approach requires exactly double display density in the primary display (vs a non-retina monitor) to work. In the Windows/Linux approach the primary display can have any pixel density and it'll work reasonably.

Sorry for digging this up, but as i strongly rely on office programs (yup, I like my Word '10) and Office for Mac is crap, i played around a little in the past and stumbled about something used in VMWare Fusion.
I am aware that VMWare runs a full-featured copy of Windows.
But: Until a year or so, when set to high DPI values to match retina display, windows did just what MS Office does now when run in crossover:
It bloated itself to a size which wasn't even funny to use anymore.

so when VMWare Fusion 6 Pro came out, there was a little checkbox: "use native resolution" (or anything alike).
From what i saw, it just did the OSX trick: let windows run on giant DPI and a huge virtual screen, then scaled down to fit physical pixels.
Everything is sharp and crisp. Performance is great.

I don't know if this is of any use for codeweavers team, but i'd just love to see that little checkbox in crossover and i wanted to share what was on my mind.

Have a great day!

Edit: why don't you read Hi-DPI capable flag? Couldn't OSX then take care of it?