Zooming out while keeping time reference

1

Use case:

  • Measurement zoomed in at time of interest t0
  • User keeps the mouse cursor at t0
  • User wants to see the surroundings and zooms out

What happens:

  • If the whole measurement becomes visible, the interface fits the whole measurement to the measurement display area
  • The cursor points no longer at t0, user doesn’t know where it is anymore

Suggestion:

  • Allow for the user to zoom out all the way, then zooming in again without moving the cursor returns to the same location.

I observed that turning off “Animate zooming” in 1.2.18 gives the behavior I’m asking for. This is good, please keep that in your future releases! You might want to implement a separate option “Auto-fit when zoomed out” though, for people who do want to keep the animations.

2

So the automatic ‘fit to screen’ is messing up the original position you had.

I wonder if dedicating a key to this could be a solution too, like hold ‘h’ and the x position won’t change no matter what.

3

The thing is that users don’t expect that anything would suddenly move the center position (I mean the center of the zoom, the cursor), and when auto-fit does it’s already too late for pressing a key.

I personally don’t see a benefit in automatic fit to screen, automatic or not. Oscilloscopes don’t do it, they just zoom out and show blank areas, it’s fine.

Possibly ‘f’ for fit (no automatic) for rare cases where the measurement time is very much larger than what was actually recorded, but even in that case I can’t say I would be missing it.

You could kill two birds with a stone and have ‘f’ fit to markers (plus margins) if there are markers, and fit the whole measurement if there are no markers. Just a suggestion, again, I don’t think I would use that much at all.

4

Well said.

Let me think about this.

5

I see the behaviour @ [gauthier.ostervall] reported is present in Logic 2.2.4 (did I get that right? - I can’t seem to find out from Logic 2). I agree with Gauthier that zooming out then in again should return the viewed trace to its original state. I often want to see the bigger context then zoom back to where I was.