Easier Zooming in the 10.4.8 Update
David posted a few days ago about the Mac OS X 10.4.8 update which fixes a measurement problem with Mac Intel computers in InDesign. But there’s an unexpected cool feature in 10.4.8 too: If you have a scroll wheel on your mouse and you hold down your Control key, you can zoom in smoothly!
You’ve been able to zoom in with keystrokes using the Universal Access preference panel for some time. When Zoom is turned on, you can press Cmd-Option-= to zoom in and Cmd-Option-hyphen to zoom out, but using a scroll wheel is much smoother and more intuitive. It’s a great feature if your eyes are aging faster than you’d like, or if you doing a presentation and want to highlight something.
Also, if you have one of the new laptops where you can use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll, you can now add the Control key to zoom in and zoom out. Dragging up zooms in, dragging down zooms out.
Is it just me, or does the zoom work backwards from what one would reasonably expect? I wanted to pull and document towards me and push it away, but it works the other way around — push the wheel to zoom in and pull it to zoom out.
Dave
I think if you imagine that pushing the wheel is equivalent to someone pushing your head closer to the monitor … heh … or perhaps, pushing the monitor closer to the document … it makes it easier to understand.
I remember having this same reaction with scroll bars when I got my first Mac. “Why would I want to press the DOWN scroll arrow when I want the window to scroll up?”
I find that within a couple minutes, you don’t even have to think about it. You’ll just zoom in and out naturally. (It was always harder for me to do it so naturally with the keystrokes when doing a demo.)
Ooh. This means I can reduce my type size in ESTK to 9 points. I only need it larger to examine the occasional punctuation mark or the like.
Thanks for posting this, Steve. Maybe I’m going to have to upgrade my two G4s to Tiger after all.
Dave
Wait a minute …this scroll wheel zooming works with my system too, but instead of zooming in the InDesign Page, the whole window and all its content zooms in, including palattes and rulers. So when you zoom in, these items zoom out of view.
Mmmmm …seems to work with Photoshop and any program within a window as well. This appears to be an OSX system wide feature on my computer …and because palattes can disappear, it does not seem very useful to me, unless you are visually impaired. Perhaps my problem is with my mouse (an MS mouse with proprietory software)?
It’s definitely an OS X feature. Besides those of us who need it for deteriorating vision, it’s also great for those of us who give presentations. We can zoom in on that tiny icon up there in the Control palette to show it off!