LabVIEW's Application Font Changes Between Windows Versions

Issue Details

• I have created a LabVIEW built application (.exe) on a specific version of Windows. When I run my application on different versions of Windows, my font changes style and size. How can I stop this from happening?
• My LabVIEW front panel contains a lot of labels with different sized fonts. It looks the way I want on my development machine, but when I move it to another computer, the text changes sizes and shifts on the front panel making it unreadable.
• I want the text to be static on the front panel so when I deploy it to another system it stays the way I specified.
• If you launch in Windows 7 Aero theme you have no problems. However, if you relaunch in Windows 7 Classic: the tab alignment, font spacing and numerous other window appearance features are changed or misplaced. 

Solution

• Check to make sure all of the fonts used in your application are installed on the deployment machine. If a font is not installed, the computer will choose a similar font which can cause the text to shift.
• Define the font in the initialization file following the steps below:

1. Build your VI into an executable.
2. Edit the initialization file associated with your executable to specify the font. Note: the initialization file is in the same folder as the executable, shares the same name as executable, and has the .ini extension.

3. Build an installer to install the initialize file and any custom font along with the executable.
4. Run the installer on another machine with a different version of Windows.

• Use property nodes within your code to set the font properties.

Additional Information