Zoom Slider bar makes it very difficult to type in large zoom values (Win32, bzr r12342)

[Alvin Penner]

Follow-up to
- Bug #600285 “Zoom slider”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/600285>

A relatively recent change appears to be a new slider control in the zoom box at the bottom right corner, in addition to the original text display. This means there are now 2 possible cursors: one cursor looks like two vertical arrows and is used to control the slider bar. The other cursor is the original I-beam used to allow editing of text using the keyboard. I find the presence of two separate cursors within the same control box to be extremely confusing and annoying, especially since the two vertical arrows show up in many cases where they should not. In other words, the two vertical arrows often show up in cases where you are actually hovering over the text and wish to edit the text using the keyboard, but cannot because it is the wrong cursor.
    At small zoom values, as in the attached Zoom143.png, this is almost workable, because the text area is quite large.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

    At large zoom values, as in the attached Zoom5215.png, the control becomes almost unusable because the text area is very small. I often wish to zoom in to a precise level such as 10000%. This needs to be typed in by hand, but one cannot do that without first getting the appropriate cursor which is extremely difficult because the text area is too small and the I-beam cursor never shows up.

   I would suggest removing the slider part of the control, since it is redundant and confusing.

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

@Alvin - On Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.10 i find that the cursor is mostly the I-beam when hovering over the text. The slider was taken directly from Gimp - do you see the same issue there ?

It takes a bit of getting used to but the new control does offer more functionality
* Quick zoom to any level by dragging
* Quick zoom up/down by mouse scroll
* Click and type any zoom level
* Double click the up/down arrows to double/half the current zoom
* Right click to show context menu with preset zoom levels

For zooming to a precise level - would it be useful to have more levels on the right click context menu - that might save you from typing - maybe (12.5,25,50,100,200,500,1000,2000,5000,10000%) ?

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

>> On Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.10 i find that the cursor is mostly the I-beam when hovering over the text.

- unfortunately I do not have Windows 7 running Inkscape trunk. I have Windows 7 running Inkscape 0.48.4, and Windows XP running the latest trunk code. The difficulty of getting the I-beam to appear is actually my main problem with the control. Even when the zoom level is 1%, which means that the slider bar has disappeared entirely, it is still very difficult to get the I-beam to appear. In this case one would intuitively expect that the entire control would be given over to text since there is no slider bar at all, and that therefore it should be very easy to get the I-beam to show up. But in this case, roughly 75% of the left side of the control will produce the two vertical arrows, and only 25% at the right side will produce the I-beam.

>> The slider was taken directly from Gimp - do you see the same issue there ?

- I was not able to find this particular slider bar in Gimp, but I am not a regular user of Gimp, so maybe I did not look in the right place. I was able to find a very interesting double control in the Gimp Brushes dialog box. I am attaching a screenshot of it. This one shows a slider for Spacing, plus a separate spin box for spacing, and they are synchronized with each other, and you can type into the spin box using the keyboard. This would be absolutely perfect as far as I am concerned, but I guess this would probably consume more real estate than desired.

>> the right click context menu

thanks for pointing this out, I was not aware that this context menu existed. Yes, it would be extremely helpful to have more levels to choose from, as you mentioned. Currently I have (200, 100, 50, Page, Drawing, Selection). However even here there is a practical problem, namely that the context menu is available only if you have the I-beam cursor, which is the source of the problem in the first place. If you have the vertical arrows cursor, then the context menu does not appear when you do a right click, and instead you get movement of the zoom as though this were a left click. This is atypical for Windows. As far as I know most Windows applications will give you a context menu on a right click regardless of what the left click functionality is and regardless of the appearance of the cursor. Here the right click behaviour is contingent upon the cursor which is very unexpected.

(P.S. sorry to give you a hard time about this. I am aware of the fact that this is a Gtk issue, not an Inkscape issue, but I am not familiar with how to report problems to Gtk, and so I am complaining here instead. I guess all I'm saying is that for a typical Windows user this will be a very steep learning curve. Perhaps if there were a more appropriate forum elsewhere, then my complaints could be re-directed there, somewhere...)

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

Just writing to indicate that changing the word Zoom to the shorter form Z: does not improve things in any way. I mean it does not make it easier to get access to the I-beam cursor. The width of the area on the right, where the I-beam cursor appears, is controlled by the width of the numerical text on the right, not related to the position of the slider bar at all. So if the text says 1.0% then the I-beam will show up only when this narrow text area is hovered over, despite the fact that there is a large area of blank space in the middle which is all dedicated to the two vertical arrows.

[Alexis Pautrot (0-alexis)]

Hi

>> On Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.10 i find that the cursor is mostly the I-beam when hovering over the text. The slider was taken directly from Gimp - do you see the same issue there ?

I have the exact same issue. I'm running Windows 7 with Inkscape 0.48+devel r12274.

The I+beam is very hard to get, making the edition of values by hand very painful. You just can't select or focus the text, you have to blindly hover the text until the I-beam appears.

The slider text field sounds a great idea in theory, but it is not. In practice you never use it for opacity, blur factors or zoom level, you set all those values by typing them. When on slider click is conflicting with on text click, it becomes more than painful. This control is why I left Gimp. It was too much nonsense of user experience. Adding things sometimes make them worse, not better. Less is more.

There is in my experience only one kind of values that I'm setting with a slider and pleased to do so, and those values are the color components (RGBA, HSL, etc.).

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

@Alvin, @Alexis - thanks for your feedback.
Based on your comments as i will revert the changes to the Zoom control.
Will also add more zoom levels to the context menu for faster zooming for your usage patterns.

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

Zoom slider reverted in r12377.
Additional zoom levels in context menu r12378.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

thanks, rev 12387 is working well.
and the extra zoom levels in the context menu are very helpful

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Changing bug status in accordance to
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Bug_management#Bug_status>