Hi
…apologies…long post ahead;
I’m getting very frustrated by the scrollwheel behaviour in LayOut.
To clarify; the scrollwheel (Windows 10) does the following things:
- Zooms in and out when located over the LayOut Page area.
- Scrolls the menu tray up and down when located over the tray.
- Scrolls the individual menus when located over them (such as Tags or Pages)
- Scrolls through and applies specific settings such as Line Scale, Stroke weight, visible Scene
Is this correct behaviour? Or do I have a strange setting specific to my setup?
BTW I’ve experienced this on different windows PCs and with different mice (Logitech Pro wireless and Steelseries Sensei wired).
If it is intentional, then the scrollwheel appears to have overlapping and conflicting functions.
There are two main issues with this approach:
- Scrolling up and down on the menu tray will risk landing your cursor on a settings input box and then scrolling through that. This will result in settings being applied inadvertantly and unintentionally, leading to signficant errors and delays.
- Sometimes there’s a bug that occurs when scrolling something while an object (eg a viewport) is selected; this appears to cause errors that can be very damaging, particulalry to complex files. The main errors are:
- Unintentionally moving (nudging) the selected viewport (or other drawing object) up or down on the page.
- Unintentionally shifting the order of a page within the pages menu (without mouseclicking).
For 1), I dont see any great reason why the individual menus and, especially, the individual settings, need to be scrolled through. Further, I really don’t understand why the scrollwheel alone can select and apply settings. A click should be required to apply most settings…nobody is going to scroll one by one through the list of Scales, or Scenes and apply each one as they go. It’s just the wrong choice of interface technique.
Assuming this is a common issue, not just my own little bug, then what I would like to see:
- An option to restrict the scrollwheel to only Zoom and Scroll menu tray functions; nothing else.
- An option to remove the automatically-selected Move tool every time a viewport is clicked on.
A bit more explanation by way of some common (and very problematic) examples:
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Pages shuffling out of sequence is very problematic in a large multi-page document; it can happen without noticing and if, like me, your drawing Number is related to the auto-text Page Number, then your drawing numbering system is also out of sequence. NB no mouseclicks are involved…the scrollwheel will automatically pick up and shift pages. This happens very often.
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Moving (nudging) the SU viewport or other selected item on a LO Page causes all sorts of issues with alignment between the template/titleblock, stacked viewports, dimensions, annotations, multi-page items…anything tied to that view…this is a major problem and can lead to long loading delays, errors and crashes on a complex document. I can’t think of any good reason why scrolling would be linked to the Move Tool. I can’t even understand why the Move Tool is automatically engaged just by clicking on a viewport…is this supposed to be a time-saver (quicker than pressing a shortcut key)? - then how often do people need (or want) to move a viewport??? I’ve wasted hours resetting viewport locations because of slight and unintentional nudges.
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Srolling through and selecting - and applying - specific settings including Scene, Font, View, Lineweight, Render Mode, etc can cause significant frustration through long loading times and errors, and these setting changes can be applied without even noticing! Surely a mouseclick should be required to actually apply a setting? Most of these settings menus actually work very well by just using the dropdown arrow to bring up the list of options, then mouse-clicking on the selection…easy…so why are they scrollable?. It’s a peculiar interface design that puts a long list of items (eg document Scales) into a scrollable list, but only has one line of text visible at any time. (I also suspect that exposing these many items makes LO run more slowly in general).
I made a quick recording - showing two actions:
- with viewport selected, hovering the mouse over any input box on the Tray makes the viewport nudge up or down.
- with no viewport or other item selected, and after trying to scroll the Tray down, there’s a bit of lag in the scroll behaviour that inadvertantly causes settings changes to the Dash, Start Arrow AND End Arrow styles (all within a split second).
