If the name of footprint is long, the footprint is shown very small in preview window.
This situation can be fixed if the footprint will be fitted in the preview windows and the footprint name will not be taken into consideration by the preview window. The footprint name is also shown in the drop down list, so it is not really necessary.
Also the zoom possibility of footprint could be a helpful feature.
Application: kicad
Version: (5.1.0)-1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.61.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1 (WinSSL) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.6 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) nghttp2/1.34.0
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.68.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.61.1
Compiler: GCC 8.2.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON
(I'm not a KiCad developer.)
What preview window do you mean? When I e.g. attach a footprint to a symbol there's a view in the dialog which shows the footprint. Zooming and panning work just like in the footprint editor or board editor.
I agree that the footprints should be zoomed automatically without taking the texts into consideration. It's annoying to try to find a footprint using the arrow key to move from one footprint in the list to the next one when the zoom level changes between similar footprints. Oftentimes there are only small differences between consecutive footprints which I want to compare.