fit to = 0 usability question...

[Wayne Schuller <k_wayne schuller id au>]

hi everyone,

This question is really directed at Morten, based on changes to the
printer dialog and glade file, but they effect gnumeric usability so I
will send to the list.

I have been catching up with the latest and greatest gnumeric. The
recent CVS HEAD is really nice. Great work Jody, Morten and team. The
graphs look really great. I never ever got the bonobo graphs working in
the good-old-days, so it is great to see nice graphs in gnumeric.

I was interested to see that the "fit-to" printing option defaults to 0,
which I thought was really strange. Reading the code I see 0 = normal
100% scaling. This is not really intuitive, and I'm not sure why you
would ever choose 0. Having "0" as the default is redundant because the
scale radio button is already defaulted to "Adjust to 100%" - if you
click the "fit to" radio button then you must definitely want something
other than 100% scaling.

The old gnumeric (with this bit I helped implement!), used to default to
1, which I thought was the majority use case for "fit to", someone wants
to make their document fit on 1 page exactly. Obviously they can change
it to something higher, but I'm not sure why you would want to set it to
0.

In the original glade file I think there was a bug (my mistake!) that
let you set the spin to zero. Browsing cvs on the web I see that Morten
fixed this bug (good!), but then reverted it and allowed the "0=100%"
usage case. I wonder why you did this rather than just fix the glade
spin widget minimum?

I'm guessing, Morten, that you did it because it is what excel did, or
because the bug existed we had to maintain the "0" option for backwards
compatibility with old gnumeric files? Is it possible to simply not
allow "0" in the spin button and make 1 the minimum?

If not, would you be willing to accept a patch that at least makes the
default "1"?[1] I think this is the most usable default. 

For my use at least, 99% of the time I click on the "fit to" radio
button because I want to make my document fit on one printed page
exactly. This feels like a small usability regression compared to the
old gnumeric.

thanks,
wayne
[1] Actually you don't really need me to send you a patch to change a
default from 0 to 1. But my gnumeric hacking skills are rusty and it
might be a good warm up activity for me. :)