Zooming in LO window

I usually follow the approved method when creating SU windows within LO by first creating a scene in SU. It’s then easy to import and adjust scale. However, you don’t always want to produce an SU scene for every little detail that appears in LO. Often, it’s simpler to copy an existing window in LO and alter the scale. That works fine if the scale difference is modest, but if it’s large all you tend to end up with is a blank window because you have homed in on a void area of the drawing. Trying to find the bit you want to show then becomes very hard. It might help if one knew what point in the drawing LO uses to scale up from as you would have an idea in which direction to travel. I am sure it must be standard but I have not worked out what it is. Does anyone know?

Of course, you can make things easier by double clicking the window and zooming and panning, but as DaveR often points out, that modifies the window and breaks the link so it’s best avoided.

Simon, before you change the scale for the viewport, drag its edges to make it larger. Clearly if you are making a large change in the scale, you’ll need to drag the edges more. As to where in the model the center of the scaling is, it depends a great deal on how you set up the scene in the first place and what you’ve done with the edges of the viewport. If the area you’re showing is left of the center of the scene, you would have moved the viewport edges toward the left. That’s going to mean you be looking at a different part of the model than if the viewport is centered on the scene.

Probably easiest to not think to hard. If you are quadrupling the scale, make the viewport about 4 times larger. Don’t worry about getting it exact. Adjust the scale and fine tune the edges of the viewport.

And, yes, do not allow the viewport’s scene to show as modified.

@DaveR I think what you have described is what I actually do. It works fine up to about a doubling in scale but beyond that it becomes quite a chore, widening the window, stretching it, moving it, etc. What I was wanting to understand is what it is in the setting up of the scene in SU that defines the scaling point in LO. I think that would help as you would at least know in which direction to start stretching. It is quite easy to stretch to the limits and still find you just have blank screen with no idea where you are in the model.

It would also be easier if I had an enormous screen but I don’t!

As I said, it depends on what you might have done to the viewport’s borders before scaling. You can untick Preserve scale on resize after scaling. That will help you by centering the view.

Dave, I don’t necessarily do anything to the borders before scaling. It is usually the other way around, ie. I import a SU scene and set its scale to, say, 1/20. Then I might copy that window and change its scale to 1/5. That’s when I have to start pushing and pulling to get the detail I want to home in on.

Forgive me but I don’t know what “unstick Pteserve” means or how you do it. Can you expand?

I do this sort of thing quite frequently but it’s never seemed like a big problem to me so I’m having a hard time figuring out why it’s a big problem for you.

Stupid autocorrect!

Untick Preserve scale…

OK, here’s an example. I have created a LO file with two viewports. The one on the left shows the SU scene imported and then set to a standard 1/50 scale. Say I then want to home in on the sectional details on the right hand side. I copy the first viewport and then set the scale to 1/5. I just get a blank. To be able to navigate to the right spot, it would help to know which way to start stretching the viewport but in fact I only find I can do it by trial and (quite a lot of) error.

I wouldn’t normally have such a big difference in scale without creating a separate scene but it serves to illustrate my point.

Proposed.layout (2.0 MB)

In this example, it appears to zoom to the middle of the SU scene.

As I said before, resize the copied viewport BEFORE changing the scale.

Then change the scale.

Then resize the viewport to show only what you want to show.

That works quite well on first import, I agree. But sometimes you want to copy a window from one page to another, say, that has already been zoomed. In that case, it can be very difficult to know where you are.

To be honest, I don’t really know what can be done about it and I may be in a minority of one that is bothered by it.

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