ID CS Win: Mouse wheel zoom problem

[Keith...@adobeforums.com]

Hi

I'm having a problem with a "quirk" in InDesign CS - I'm not sure whether its my setup, a preferences thing, or a bug in IDCS Win. In most windows apps you can use Ctrl+MouseWheel to "zoom" in some way. MSOffice apps zoom, IE "zooms" the text size, as does Firebird, etc. etc. This also worked in Quark4.

It kinda works in IDCS as well, but its badly flawed. Zooming out works ok, but zooming in also scrolls to the rightmost extent of the pasteboard - so you end up looking at blank white space, and then have to either scroll back, or zoom out again, position the document and use the keyboard shortcuts.

I'm finding mouse zoom a difficult habit to break, as I use it all the time in most applications. Any ideas how to fix this? Can anyone else reproduce this?

Thanks

Keith

[Ken_...@adobeforums.com]

No problem here.

Mouse wheel operations are something that Adobe seems stubbornly reluctant
to document. In ID1.5 and 2.0, clicking the wheel took you through a series
of up-down, left-right, in-out movements and heavy-handed use of the wheel
could easily click you into the next part of the sequence with unexpected
and irritating results. But as far as I can see nothing was ever documented
in the manual.

CS is a great improvement. The wheel is now restricted to up-down movements.
I hadn't realised it had the zoom function with Ctrl until your post - and
yes, for me it goes in and out with the centre focused on the cursor
position just fine.

But again, I can't see anything in the manual which documents this. I've
tried other key combinations with the wheel but so far I've only found the
up-down, in-out actions. Has anybody found it to do anything else?

k

Another improvment I'm not sure I've read about is that CS appears to open
at the page that was on screen when the file was closed after a save - 2.0
always opened at page 1 for me.

[Keith...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks Ken - I did read a post about clicking the wheel and was wondering why it didn't seem to work for me (CS is the first version of ID I've used).

I've now figured out my problem, and a workaround:

I run a dual-monitor setup at work, and have done for 2 years or so. Its pretty much indispensable for me - I don't like working at home anymore, as I only have the one screen there (no space, and not enough cash to spend on 2 big LCDs). The dual display is powered by an ATI Radeon VE, aka 7000. As a side note: I don't think this is the best dual display option by a long chalk - I'll put this in a follow-up. It would appear this zoom problem is in some way related to the display drivers, or the hydravision dual-display-control software. If I put the ID window on the right-hand monitor, I get this crazy zoom-to-the-right function. On the left monitor, zooming works as you describe - zooming in at the pointer position.

Why this is the case I've no idea. I am running the latest version of both the display drivers and the hydravision software - I upgrade it whenever I can, in the hope they might have fixed some of the bugs...

Anyhow - I just need to make a mental note to always use the left monitor for ID.

Cheers!

[Keith...@adobeforums.com]

Peter - good tip!

[Peter_...@adobeforums.com]

There are lots of undocumented goodies. For example, you can define a keyboard shortcut that moves the cursor into the page number box at the bottom of the screen so you can quickly jump to a page.

Maybe a separate thread is useful where undocumented stuff is listed.

Peter

[Peter_...@adobeforums.com]

Ken,

Alt+wheel moves the screen left-right.

P.

[Ken_...@adobeforums.com]

Peter

I tried Alt+wheel this morning and nothing happened. Now it does. Thanks.
(Not so good for left handers :-})

Keith

Matrox cards get a particularly good feedback from InDesign users, but even
with these there are some settings that can cause odd behaviour. I wonder if
your ATI card has any kind of desktop facilities (like Matrox QuickDesk)
which could offer settings to prevent your problem.

k

[Keith...@adobeforums.com]

OFFTOPIC!

I was going to write this earlier but unfortunately real work intruded ;)

Ken: I may investigate Matrox cards, and nVidia's dual-display cards, as I'm not particularly enamoured with the way in which my desktop functions at the moment.

Before the machine I use now, I had a dell box with built-in Intel graphics, and a PCI nVidia TNT2 card. I used the multimonitor features within windows to control the dual displays, and for the most part it worked well. Applications maximised to their current monitor, but could be manually sized to span both displays if required. I was also able to calibrate the colour settings for each monitor, and save a profile for each. My only major gripe was that the intel card wasn't especially capable and struggled to display truecolour at high resolutions.

In my new machine (with the ATI board) windows sees the two monitors as one contiguous desktop. This means (for example) that the taskbar stretches across both screens - in the previous setup, it appeared on only one display, although it could be moved to whichever I preferred. Windows therefore maximise to the entire desktop - both monitors - without software intervention.

ATIs "solution" to this is called Hydravision, and allows you to set global preferences for how window should behave, whilst still allowing you to override specific applications - for example I had Premiere set to maximise to the full with of the desktop.

It doesn't work very well though. I'm working with the IE window I'm writing in maximised to one screen. If I minimise it, or place another window infront of it, I click on its button in the taskbar to bring it to the front again. Which works. If I do it again however, when it returns it maximised to the full width of the desktop, ie both monitors. For no good reason...

The dialog box-repositioning doesn't always work either - some windows don't work and stubbornly appear split across the middle of both screens.

And some applications (quark 4 is a prime example) when opened have all their toolbars clustered in the centre of the screen - moved by Hydravision to the centre of the active window.

Hydravision also offers various transparency and fading effects which are at best pointless eyecandy - but on my system at least, are painfully slow, so unusuable even if they weren't rather annoying to look at (btw: the rest of the machine is more than powerful enough P4-2.8, 1Gb RAM, several large/fast drives - I think the blame can be laid at the Radeon card, which is pretty old/slow).

Anyway - I know this is waaaaay offtopic so I'll stop ranting - thanks for the tips!

[Keith...@adobeforums.com]

Oh yeah - Peter: I think an "Undocumented features, tips & tricks" thread would be a great idea - if the moderators could periodically prune the thread, and make it sticky, it would be a great resource.

[Ken_...@adobeforums.com]

A MAtrox card will enable you to select either one contiguous desktop or two
separate desktops. It has a 'Centre pop up' function which loads dialogue
boxes to the centre of a display, but which also causes InDesign palettes to
load on top of one another. This feature can be switched off.

As I said before, whenever discussion of dual monitors takes place here,
there is an overwhelming support for using Matrox cards.

If you do switch to Matrox, one word of warning. Don't let Windows load the
drivers. Use the Matrox installer. If you let Windows load the drivers you
don't get all the options for the card's features - at least, that's what
applies to driver updates.

k

[Kala...@adobeforums.com]

Keith,

I run two dual-monitor 7500 series ATI cards producing a semi-circular "array" of four monitors, all of which work fine and fast with the Hydravision software. I think either your cards are old or you've got a configuration problem or you don't have XP.

Each window gets it's own separate perfectly-functioning maximize-minimize functions with the taskbar only across or alongside whichever monitor edge you choose. I'll often have 12 or 16 windows open from numerous programs each tiled behind each other in orderly fashion on the four different screens.

The ability to mouse seamlessly across all four monitors is perfect. If you do want to stretch a particular window across even up to four monitors, that's not a problem either.

Speed is very good even when running a half-dozen memory-hungry apps and listening to streaming audio documentaries or whatever. I built this thing last spring with the two ATI dual-monitor 7500s, two 80-gig Seagates, a gig ram, and an Athlon 2400 on XP Pro.

Here's something I didn't notice from your post. I'm running it on XP Pro OS. If your running 2000 or something like that, perhaps that's the root of your issues.

As for your wheel-mouse scrolling issue, it's likely that something in your software set-up (OS?) is limiting correct behavior to the "default" monitor switchable through "display properties".

In short, I've had no problems with the ATI dual-monitor cards or the "Hydravision" software. If you're thinking of switching out the cards, these have 64meg/card and were only $75 "white-box" searched out on some large-inventory place like J&R. Haven't the foggiest what a Matrox, etc. would cost.

Mitra

[Mike_Wi...@adobeforums.com]

Peter,

You wrote:

There are lots of undocumented goodies. For example, you can define a
keyboard shortcut that moves the cursor into the page number box at the
bottom of the screen so you can quickly jump to a page.

I thought this one was already known and documented as the ctrl-J shortcut (as borrowed from QXP), no?

Mike Witherell

[Peter_...@adobeforums.com]

Mike--
Generous helping of humble pie for me this evening. Just checked and it was in ID 2 indeed but never saw it! Still think undocumented thread is a good idea but maybe people should be encouraged to check if what they think is an undocumented new feature wasn't already there in ID 2. I at least shall be more vigilant!

Peter

[Jeff_...@adobeforums.com]

New feature - you can now drag guides onto the ruler to delete them. you couldn't do this in ID2.

but I haven't looked to see if it is 'documented'

Jeff

[Steve_...@adobeforums.com]

Jeff,

It is good that InDesign CS lets you do that, but that's probably mostly for the benefit of recent users of PageMaker or QuarkXPress.

It's actually much faster to select or multiple-select guides and hit Delete.

Another method which is relatively little known is to select your page in the Pages palette, select Layout > Create Guides, check the Remove Existing Ruler Guides checkbox, and click OK. Useful if you have a lot of guides on the page and you want to clear them all out.

[Teus_d...@adobeforums.com]

To go back to the initial topic: there seems to be a bug in the scrolling behaviour of ID CS. In a pretty large document, it happens quite often (especially after saving) that the scrolling wheel has stopped functioning. The same happened in ID2, but there you could restore it by first selecting a textframe and after that selecting text. In ID CS it seems impossible to do that: I have to close the document and open it again. (Which leads to one of the many nice improvements: after reloading you are in the right place in your document.) Anyone else noticed this problem? Possible remedies?

Teus de Jong

[patrick...@adobeforums.com]

Teus,

I have the same problem.

I haven't refined the problem to the cause. The result is the same. After using the program for a while, the normal vertical mouse wheel scrolling no longer works.

Drives me crazy because as you pointed out, the only way to get the functionality back is to close ID.

Patrick

[Keith...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for your message Mitra:

> I run two dual-monitor 7500 series ATI cards producing a semi-circular
"array" of four monitors

Nice!

> Here's something I didn't notice from your post. I'm running it on XP
Pro OS. If your running 2000 or something like that, perhaps that's the
root of your issues.

Could be - our corporate environment is 2000-only at the moment, so there's not a lot I can do if its a 2k issue. However, there are vast numbers of people, particularly business users, still using 2000 who are unlikely to switch anytime soon (if at all). With that in mind, I'd hope OS support wasn't to blame here!

So you don't experience any problems with windows accidentally maximising to the width of the display?

> As for your wheel-mouse scrolling issue, it's likely that something
in your software set-up (OS?) is limiting correct behavior to the "default"
monitor switchable through "display properties".

I took a look, and there doesn't seem to be any options which would make a difference. I'll have to do some tests with other apps to check whether they also have problems with mousewheel actions on the right-hand monitor, or whether its just ID. IDs the first app I've noticed it with, tho.

Cheers

Keith

[Teus_d...@adobeforums.com]

Patrick,

I did not say close ID down, but close the document (or save it) and load it again. I don't have to close Indesign.

Teus

[DC_T...@adobeforums.com]

When scroll locks up I also have to close the document and reload if I want to continue using the mouse wheel.

I don't know if it's just coincidence, but the couple times I checked, graphics display was set to high quality when scroll stopped working. I'm running 1 gig of ram on an XP system with no other applications except for an under 2 mb InDesign doc open with medium size photos. I'm using a logitech MX700 optical mouse.

[Kala...@adobeforums.com]

Keith,

So you don't experience any problems with windows accidentally >maximising
to the width of the display?

Any problems?: Zip, zero, none. Maintaining individual screen maximize-minimize is hassle free while at the same time one works with a single mouse and keyboard across all four screens, stretching the pasteboard across as many screens as you want if you choose to do so, but ONLY if you choose to do so (this is done from the not-quite fully maximized state...If you then "maximize" a window which has been "stretched" like that, it will immediately "snap" to full-screen on the one monitor from which you began the "stretch" action.

I usually don't feel the need to do this stretching however. I just park my palettes on one screen, give the adjacent screen over to an uncluttered pasteboard and run "reference" programs on the far-left and far-right screens.

Of course I can't guarantee it, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if your problems would be solved by simply spending $75 on a 7500 series dual-monitor card, making sure then that you got the very latest version of the Hydravision software. It's a gamble (as noted, could be the 2000 OS issue), but relatively small stakes as gambles go.

Cheers,
Mitra