On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:05 PM, Aaron Elmquist <ironranger@...155...> wrote:
But, when I go from 100% to 70% zoom and my grid goes from every 10 pixels to every 50 I get a little irked. I also think this is rightfully so.
One one hand, we have a developer who wrote this code. When faced with lots of choices at every step - how often to suppress lines on zoom out, how close to allow lines, what colors, how to treat major/minor etc - he most often goes with a gut feeling. "Looks about right." "That would be sensible I think." He does some testing but usually not much.
And on the other hand, we have users like you who spend a lot of time with the feature and who would like to change a lot of the numbers and behavior quirks.
How can these users get what they want? Filing detailed bugs with test cases and use cases is good. But if you have even a very superficial knowledge of programming, in many cases it would be easier and more rewarding to just patch the source. For example all the logic of disappearing lines on zoomout is in CanvasXYGrid::Update in the file src/display/canvas-grid.cpp. It's easy to understand this little function just by what you know from using the program, and it has comments on why it does it the way it does, and it's very easy to adjust the constants, recompile, and see if it is better, as many times as needed. Then, just submit a patch. This may sound intimidating at first, but it's not difficult and is quite fun.