GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 143747
Add "Other..." to zoom drop-down
Last modified: 2005-02-09 02:04:26 UTC
There should be a link to the zoom ratio dialog in the zoom dropdown at the bottom of the image. Also, you should be able to access it from the image menu without having to select a standard zoom ratio first and then select 'other'.
Personally I don't think that dialog is particulary useful and GtkComboBox at the moment doesn't offer the functionality we'd need to implement this functionality (it lacks support for separators). If you can come up with a proposal on how to make the zoom ratio dialog be better accessible from the View->Zoom menu, I'd like to hear about that.
Note that the current Zoom menu is basically copied from Mozilla.
Is there a reason for the zoom ratios to be radio buttons? It seems like making them normal menu commands would work the same way, and would solve the problem I mentioned. Also, I agree that the combobox is fairly useless - I would personally like a quick way to get a specific zoom ratio. Perhaps it could be replaced by an entry field for the zoom percentage like the one in Painter? It has a couple of idiosyncrasies that make it convenient rather than annoying: - The contents are highlighted when it is clicked so they don't have to be manually erased. - It only has focus from the time it is clicked until the user types in a new value and presses enter, or presses escape/clicks elsewhere to keep the current value. If it kept focus after getting a new value it would interfere with hotkeys. - If a bogus value is entered, the current value is kept and focus is switched back to the image.
The combobox is an experiment and I will happily remove it if it turns out not to be useful. However I don't think that it makes sense to develop custom widgets that look like standard entries but behave completely different. That's certainly not a good idea from a useability point of view.
Please note that I don't think the combobox is useless (you said you'd agree with me on this). I said that the "zoom ratio dialog" is rather useless. Not saying that it should be removed but I don't think it is commonly used. The combobox is IMO a nice indicator for the current zoom ratio and gives quick access to standard zoom ratios. But if it turns out that most people dislike it, then I will agree that it should be removed. Such things would better be discussed on the mailing-lists (gimp-developer and gimp-user) though.
I don't believe I'd call that behavior 'completely different', but you are absolutely right, of course. I suppose I had just gotten used to having that feature after using it for a while. The reason I don't find the combobox useful is that I don't find the standard zoom ratios to be very useful in general. I usually want to zoom relative to the size of the element of the picture I'm working on, so I don't really know the actual zoom ratio that would be necessary, and therefore it's easier to use the +/- keys or shift+mousewheel. It is a good indicator of the current zoom, though (but I tend to look toward the titlebar for that). I think you may have overlooked my comment about the menu items.
I didn't overlook that but it's a different issue and shouldn't be discussed in this bug-report.
This can be implemented rather easily as soon as we depend on GTK+-2.6.
It turned out that it wasn't all that easy, but it's there now: 2005-02-09 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * app/display/gimpscalecombobox.[ch] * app/display/gimpstatusbar.c: add an "Other..." item to the scale menu in the image window. Somewhat hackish but fixes bug #143747. The display scale dialog acts somewhat strange still, but that's another issue...