I have been playing around with the print settings as the school has gotten new lasers (Trotec) and instead of being able to directly print out of Rhino to the laser as we did before with our Epilogs, their print manager wants a PDF as an intermediate file. In doing my experiments, I was reminded of the phenomenon in the print dialog that I have found very annoying for many years.
Lets say the dialog is expanded vertically to where you have a right side scroll bar to go between the different sections (Destination, View and Output scale, Margins and position, Linetypes, etc.). As I scroll down through the sections with the mouse wheel, the moment the hand cursor crosses one of the dropdowns in a particular section like View (Perspective, Top, Front, etc.) or Scale (1:1 etc.) that dropdown takes over the scrolling. This leads to unwanted changes in the view - it might change from Top to Perspective - but more importantly it could lead to changes in the output scale.
A change in view will probably be noticeable in the preview, but a change in output scale might not. And if the output is going to a laser, that will mean that everything will be cut at the wrong scale.
The solution to this is forcing the user to click once in the dropdown to enable mouse scrolling through the options in that particular dropdown. That way inadvertent changes can be avoided as one quickly scrolls through the main sections of the dialog, and if one actually wants to change one of the settings in the dropdown, clicking there first is the logical thing to do. Otherwise, the mouse wheel should just continue to scroll between sections.
Two other requests I have here are:
- Be able to save a custom “paper” size for re-use (i.e. a laser table or a non-standard sheet size)
- Be able to define a custom default print width like one can in Properties instead of being limited to the choices in the dropdown.
I’m sure #1 has already been requested at some point.