Help me understand the document view pan behavior (middle mouse)

[Plop]

Hello all,

I've recently discovered Scribus. Feature-wise it looks fantastic as it seems to have everything I need for two upcoming publishing projects.
However I am having issues with the way document view panning behaves. (Note that I do understand the difference between the concepts of "cursor-centered scroll zooming" and that of "step zooming" relative to the currently selected element.)

Here is some footage showing my problem. It shows that depending on the zoom level I am at (and also depending on the way I've zoomed to that point, either by using cursor scroll zooming or step zooming), my document panning range gets limited in odd, unexpected ways.

I understand that the document scratch distances can play a role here, and that cursor-centered zoom can get one out bounds so to speak. But still, I always seem to hit some invisible bounding box making the review of the current document more frustrating that it should be. Perhaps this is related to some hidden document property for canvas size or work area ?

For the sake of comparison I am including some footage from Inkscape. It lets me pan around very freely and that makes a world of difference when reviewing a large number of pages - I can go wherever I want and I am never hitting any kind of boundary when panning, even when going far to the sides. The same kind of freedom is possible in every 2D CAD software, and also in the vast majority of raster and vector creation software.

This is obviously not a deal breaker as this doesn't impact document editing in and of itself. But still, could someone please help me understand what to expect ? Or am I running into a bug ?

[Plop]

FWIW, some more info : on creating an empty 20x10cm document there seems to be some kind of hard-coded or hidden property (seemingly not found in the xml) limiting the canvas surface available for panning. It appears to be roughly 33cm wide and 34cm tall in this case. Here's a temporary upload :

[MrB]

There's no bug, that's just how the canvas is written. You have not said what you are trying to achieve though, and why having a larger canvas when the page is small is important.

[AdmFubar]

It is just a limit of the current zoom level. from the main menu, go to File/Preferences, in the window that opens look for Operator Tools, it is listed about midway down on the left, select and the tab should be set to zoom, your minimum is sent to somewhere around 20%. adjust to your liking.


almost forgot, you will need to restart scribus to activate the change.

[Plop]

Hello ! Thank you both for chiming in, this is appreciated.

@AdmFubar my current values for Preferences > Operator > Zoom are :
minimum : 1%
maximum : 500%
Stepping : 15%

Zooming itself is not the issue as the software lets me zoom in and out just fine (using a combination of the two zooming methods available). The issue I am running into relates to the panning of the resulting document view, as I am constantly hitting some unexpected and seemingly arbitrary bounding edges on the left and right side.

Here is some more footage clearly showing the issue. If you look at the mouse cursor (hand) you'll notice that the panning stops even though I keep dragging. This is consistent with the representation of the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the screen of course.

Therefore, a different way for me to formulate the issue would be : how does one edit the range of the horizontal scrollbar of a given document ? This has to be defined somewhere. Also you'll notice that in the footage above I somehow ended up with the document stuck off center.

Now if this panning range isn't defined by some value, one would then assume that it relies on math to adjust/normalize things dynamically. If so, my guess would be that the current implementation of zoom scroll to cursor is probably the culprit here, since zoom-scrolling to cursor is specifically the one mean through which one can get "out of bounds" of the scratch space, so to speak.

@MrB This is case of personal preference of course, as nearly all design software allow for either a very wide or even infinite range of the document view panning - be it Photoshop, Inkscape, Krita, MOI3D, Autocad, FreeCAD, and so on.

Now if I were to attempt to justify this personal preference I'd say that being able to have the most free, unrestricted birds eye view on one's work and the ability to pan around a complex document freely allows to spot things to change or fix very easily. It's a review tool.

BTW I should probably mention that I am on Win10 x64, using Scribus 1.6.6.

[AdmFubar]

i think i figured it out just now, there might be a "limit" as there isnt any object off the page., add an object and drag it to the left or right, drag it past the bounds of the view window.with the object sitting past the window view, pan the view, you should see the space for the slider extend  as the object is dragged past the view. (will be noticeable when dragging off to the right) does scribus now pan when you move the slider?

[Plop]

You're absolutely on to something : adding two "forced bounds" objects (at the far upper left and far lower right) definitely unlocks to the panning limits in both directions. Very interesting, and that certainly answers part of my initial question about understanding the current behavior. Scribus feels all smooth and modern now

Now of course this is just a workaround/proof of concept for a more free pan behavior, as I suppose that keeping such out of bounds objects in a work file isn't the greatest idea. This thread wasn't meant to be taken as a request anyways, as I understand that these things are far from trivial.

Now all that said, the issue of getting the document view stuck off-center after using scroll zoom to cursor remains. Sure enough this must be affecting other users as well.