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B1020 - How do I make sure my Authorware presentation will work on different size monitors?

by - Joseph Ganci

My company will be accessing training courses over the intranet. When developing material, how do I accommodate for different monitor screen sizes throughout my company? Some employees have 15", 17" and even smaller. I am creating material using a 15" monitor so the completed piece fills up my monitor but is too small/large for other monitors. Help!

The first thing you should know is that the monitor size does not matter really - it's in reality the screen resolution setting that is the key issue. There are three settings that you will usually find:

640 horizontal pixels by 480 vertical pixels
800 horizontal pixels by 600 vertical pixels
1024 horizontal pixels by 768 vertical pixels

This is dependent only partly on your monitor. It's really the video board in your machine that controls this. The more memory on the board, the higher the resolution can be and the more colors you can have on the screen at the same time. Some machines can go to higher resolutions. On mine, for instance, I usually have it set to

1280 by 1024 pixels

But I can also set my resolution settings to:

1600 by 900 (weird)
1600 by 1024
1600 by 1200
1600 by 1280

For instance, a monitor can be 19" and be set to any of several resolution levels. So, if you were creating your application at 640 by 480 pixels and the 19" monitor is set to the same resolution, then your application will fill up the whole screen (and will appear a lot bigger than on your 15" screen). If the monitor is set to 800 by 600 pixels, however, your application now will fill up only part of the screen. It will still be all there, but the application will appear smaller. All the pixels are still there, but they are smaller, and more of them will fit on the screen.

There is no way to have your application automatically resize itself to fill up the monitor no matter the resolution. Most opt to center the application on the screen (Modify -> File -> Properties) and to use an external function called Cover() which fills up the area around your app (if there is any) with black. The Cover function is on the Authorware CD-ROM in the Goodies folder.

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