GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 85314
make 100% Zoom resemble size of actual page
Last modified: 2009-02-05 19:27:47 UTC
i am suggesting that the Zoom 100% should resemble the actual size of an A4 document to help users who want to print their Dia diagrams. Currently at about Zoom 250% is roughly the actual size of an A4 page. (The current 100% Zoom and default window size fits the height of an A4 page) For most users who do not print their diagrams this is unlikely to make a difference, but for uses who want to print this keeps the diagrams closer to a page size. With the current setup i find there is the tendency is to make very big diagrams that take up many pages. If this adjustment was made it would probaly also be necessary to adjust the default grid size and perhaps also default font and line sizes. I mentioned this on the list in this thread http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2002-May/msg00308.html
This should be possible, if we can get information about the DPI of the monitor in a portable way.
Which we can, see gdk_screen_get_{height,width}{,_mm}(). Only problem is, some X systems will not give a correct number. But it won't hurt them.
tweaked the summary while i am at it may as well add a link to this users comments http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2002-August/msg00115.html "I don't understand the scale of things, but I don't ever print diagrams anyhow - just build them for their thought-provokingness"
more mailing list madness http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2002-August/msg00117.html Dia could definately do with more Print testing, i dont think any of the current users print out their Dia Documents very often, which suits most of us fine. Some sort of a single page "Print Layout View" would be useful (like Kivio and Visio have as their default veiw) for the kind of people who like to print out their diagrams.
I think this description of UML object being too big from the mailing list is relevant. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2003-June/msg00020.html The main problem for me is the size of the objects. They are enormous, often one class takes a whole page. It's possible to change the font to make them a little smaller, but the lines remain thick. The way i've been working around this is to make a diagram over several pages and scale it down to 50% when printing.
*** Bug 115854 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is not only an issue when printing. If you work on 100% Zoom and export your file as png (and probably the other formats too) it will unexpectedly become much greater.
working with similar resolution but much differently sized screens (from 5.6" 1024x600 - 22" 1600x1050) this feature does not look like an improvement.
Hans, I am afraid I do not understand your comment. Could you elaborate a bit? Why is it not desirable to have 100% zoom show 1" as 1"? I don't see how this is connected to the size of the screen or the resolution it has. If your screen is too small to show as much of the diagram as you would like to see, you can decrease the zoom. Vice versa, if it it's to small you can increase the zoom. In your case this will work fine. It is not so easy however, to set the zoom in such a way that it resembles the actual page size (one would have to use a ruler on the screen and compare). Hence this zoom level should be easy to set automatically, and 100% zoom is just where most people would expect it.
Dia is designed around the concept of 'logical' centimeter. Only with page (not dispay!) scale of 100% this will come out as a centimeter on paper. 100% display zoom maps one logical centimeter to 20 pixels, the 'natural' size, which is independent of page size. Changing the meaining of 100% (display zoom) to map physical screen size to physical page size, would mix up the two concepts. This would add a lot of complexity to the inner workings with IMO very little gain. BTW: none of my screens it too small for Dia use; I just adapt the working distance to the size of the screen. And I simply don't see the use case of putting a sheet of paper on it to match something.
I have never heard of a "logical centimeter" before, especially not one that is defined as a fixed number of pixels. Is that concept used anywhere else? Actually that's what I don't see any use case for, and it seems quite the opposite of natural to me. A "natural" size is something that I can measure with a ruler and that does not change, not something which depends on the screen where it's displayed. The use case for 100% zoom corresponding to physical size is the following: I want to create a diagram meant for printing. To make sure that I get the proportions right I need to work at the physical size. Otherwise the diagram may be ridicously small or huge when printed. At the moment the only way to figure out the zoom level to get the physical size is to draw a 1cm line in dia, hold a ruler in front of the screen and adjust the zoom until the dia line is 1 physical cm long. It would of course be much better if I did not need the ruler (or sheet of paper) and could simply switch to 100% zoom.
Sorry, now i don't know why I tool the time for a second attempt to explain, there wont be a third by be. Maybe you want to read http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I am truly sorry that I don't understand you, but I'm really trying. I have read the smart-questions FAQ and pointed to it myself several times, but to be honest I don't see its relevance here. I haven't even really asked a question, I suugested an improvement to dia an gave an example of where comes up: "I want to create a diagram meant for printing. To make sure that I get the proportions right I need to work at the physical size. Otherwise the diagram may be ridicously small or huge when printed. At the moment the only way to figure out the zoom level to get the physical size is to draw a 1cm line in dia, hold a ruler in front of the screen and adjust the zoom until the dia line is 1 physical cm long." If I understand you correctly, then you think that setting 100% zoom to represent the physical size is not an improvement. The reason for that has something to do with logical sizes and page scale vs display scale, which is apparently beyond my understanding. But may I ask if you are saying that only the proposed fix (100% = physical size) is bad and the issue described my me should be solved differently, or are you saying that there is no problem to be solved/improved in the first place?
maybe I should have given you two different links: http://projects.gnome.org/dia/faq.html#FitToPage and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html please stop flogging dead horses
@Niklaus best ignore "NOTABUG" and instead to focus on this sentence: "This would add a lot of complexity to the inner workings with IMO very little gain." With the many posts on the mailing list and the confusion some users have with this issue and the fact that there is already workaround described in the FAQ no one could really doubt there was a problem here even if I didn't describe it particularly well. Knowing there are problems here it is disconcerting to see this marked NOTABUG instead of WONTFIX but that isn't really important because the end result is the same, Dia doesn't behave as some of us might expect and it is impractical to change that.
or just try to understand the discussion in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144128, which recently got marked as fixed because finally someone took the time to describe the behaviour.