I'm a newbie, trying to create a business card in inkscape. What I'm seeing on my monitor is distorted from what prints out in a pdf file - what my monitor shows is wider than real life, so a circular logo on my monitor prints as an oval. Thinking this is a monitor issue I've been playing with those settings but am having no luck. Also looked at the "shapes out of whack" post which seems to be the same issue I'm having - but don't know what resolution or ratio my monitor should be at.

Vista Home Premium svc pack 2, 24" Dell monitor and ATI Radeon HD 3450 if that helps.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

I'm on my XP machine at the moment, so I can't give you good "directions", but I can give general suggestions. If you go to the control panel, and find Monitor, or maybe Display, and from there find the setting for resolution, it should have, I'm guessing at least 3 different resolutions to choose from. I would guess the middle one will be the default.

I think there are separate settings for screen width and height, which I would not touch. But if you did change them, look and see if there's a button to restore the defaults.

When I get back on my Win7 machine, I can probably find some more things to "look at". And other members may have some different ideas

Edit
The default resolution will probably say (Recommended) beside it.

Thanks - I checked using my wife's computer (Win 7 Home Premium and 17" monitor set at 1280x1024 resolution) and the circle is a circle on hers. So went back and checked my monitor and it's the same resolution (1280x1024) so still wondering.....

I'm not sure if comparing your 24" monitor to you wife's 17" would be an accurate comparison. If your wife's resolution is 1280 x 1024, I think the default resolution of your 24" screen might be different?? I guess it makes sense to me that they at least would be capable of different resolutions, but whether they actually are, I don't know. Have you tried all the different resolutions offered for your monitor, and none of them make it a circle? My default resolution is 1366 x 768 on a 15" screen. So I'll bet yours is even higher/lower than that (I always get confused about resolution -- I think higher numbers mean smaller space, or something like that).

I know that on some monitors, it's possible to change the width and height of the display, separately from the resolution. (My old CRT monitor has such settings.) Have you found anything like that, or adjusted it? Also, the monitor on my laptop has an "extra wide" option, or something like that. I would guess that a 24" monitor might have such a setting as well.