On 9/2/05, Gavin Band <gavinband@...663...> wrote:
can't zoom out far enough. So, what do you propose? Unlimited zoom-out is impossible.
Is there some compelling technical reason for this?
Apart from "running out of bits" as Mental said, a more important reason is usability. If a program allows a user to go somewhere infinitely without a limit, it basically allows that user to shoot him/herself in the foot. Keyboard keys may stick, intentionally or unintentionally; what's worse, zoom is stored in the file and restored on load. All this may lead to situations where you you don't see anything on screen "no matter how long" you try to zoom in (i.e. you need to do it for a really long time but you don't know how long). If you are unaware of the zoom value field and the shortcuts such as "zoom to drawing", the program appears broken to you.
From a user's point of view, this seems like an unnecessary restriction - one expects to be able to zoom out as far as one wants
That never was a problem with regular-sized images, only with this large one. Again, I can and probably will make max zoom-out far enough for this particular image, but there will always be larger ones.
That's true. It seems to have a top section for choosing what part of the picture to export; and a bottom section including dpi and resolution boxes (and on my machine, the "Height" part seems to be greyed out).
Why not have a further section for file type, and grey out the resolution boxes if they are not relevant?
Choosing export area is also bitmap-only. For vector export, we may only select which _objects_ to export (though we don't currently have code for this, always exporting the whole image), but not the export area. That only makes sense for bitmaps.
Or have a sequence of two or three dialogs: first box: choose area of screen to export; second box: a standard "save as" dialog with the usual browser; third box: filetype-specific settings.
That's what e.g. Xara does: on "Export", first dialog is filename and file type selection, and the second one is the bitmap export settings _if_ you selected a bitmap format in the first dialog. However this is atrocious usability, I don't want us to follow this example. Having to go through two dialogs for simple export is crazy. Our bitmap export dialog with filename in it, which can be always on and tracks current selection, is infinitely more convenient. So I agree that the current bitmap export dialog can be improved (e.g. by adding other bitmap formats, or live preview in a separate pane), but I would object to breaking the filename part out of it.
(I suppose I'm thinking of the GIMP, it has "Save as..." and "Save a copy" and in both cases one first chooses the filename and then, depending on filetype, is are presented with a dialog asking for filetype-specific options.)
That's what we have too for vector formats. You save as EPS and then you get a dialog with EPS options. Makes sense for vector exports but not for bitmap, as I explained above.