"Page Width" in Preferences/View: new zoom default?

• Jun 7, 2020 - 09:19

Using the latest version ( 86614bb), I was very surprised by the display of the page. The new default (?) in Preferences/Score/View , seems to be "Page Width", instead of the 100% zoom in previous versions.
I must have missed something, has it been discussed and validated somewhere?

page width.jpg


Comments

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I agree with you, but didn't object to the change at the time because I thought it was strongly supported and I would just get outvoted.

“Page Width” can be very useful for some, but it's all but useless if you have a high-DPI display, which many people do these days. Because the utility of “Page Width” varies so widely, I don't think it's a good candidate for being the default zoom type for all fresh installations of MuseScore.

(An aside: On my system, “Whole Page” works the best, but I'm sure that it would be terrible for a lot of users.)

I really like the option to select the default zoom type, but I think the factory default should still be changed back to the safe and predictable “100%”.

In reply to by Spire42

I'm not sure what DPI has to do with anything, the physical size of your screen seems much more relevant. Also whether you typically work with MuseScore maximized / fullscreen or not, whether you typically keep the Inspector & Palettes windows open, whether your scores tend to be portrait or landscape orientation, the page and staff size you typically work with, and so forth.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I'm not sure what DPI has to do with anything, the physical size of your screen seems much more relevant.

They're both important. It doesn't matter if you have a huge screen if it has a very low DPI; conversely, it doesn't matter if you have a very high-DPI screen if it's too tiny to read comfortably.

But anyway, the point is I agree with you that the default should be changed back to “100%”.

In reply to by Spire42

The part I don't understand is why you'd say Page Width is useless if you have a high DPI screen. To me, page width is actually pretty awesome, I use it quite often on both of my regular systems, both of which are high DPI but not particularly large. And I'd still find it awesome if it were not high DPI, given the same size screen. But I don't use this setting all the time, not because my display is high DPI, but because sometimes I'm working on a score where it just doesn't make sense, or I've temporarily reduced my window size, etc. So I'm personally not sure which I'll want to set as the default for my own use - 100% or page width. But I'm very happy to have a shortcut to switch between them!

In reply to by worldwideweary

This might be too much to ask, but I'm having difficulty imagining 100% zoom being better on some screens than page-width. If any users feel this way and have some extra time on their hands to demonstrate side by side screenshots of page-width versus 100% where 100% is superior, I'd really appreciate some captures here for personal reasons and maybe some description.

In reply to by worldwideweary

I posted something similar on the developer chat, but for the sake of further discussion, here's a couple of example, not as contrived as you might thing.

12" screen, MuseScore window placed in right half so left half can be a PDF or whatever else:

Screenshot 2020-06-08 at 1.30.19 PM.png

Of course, I'd probably close the Inspector in this case as 100% isn't so useful either, but this illustrated the basic issue of cases where your window is small.

A more common case for me is here, a big band score in landscape mode, staff space size is 1mm so it's pretty small at 100% but completely unusable when reduced to page width:

Screenshot 2020-06-08 at 1.32.26 PM.png

Then, imagine you're on a 27" monitor and want to view an ordinary score. Does it really need to be twice as big as life?

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