Adobe Acrobat Zoom Annoys Me
Do you use Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows? Note this doesn’t seem to be the case with Acroread on Linux; I can’t speak for it on Mac OS.
In any case, the Hand Tool, which is the default selected mouse tool when you launch Acrobat, serves two uses regrettably. First, it enables one to drag the document within the viewing pane (left/right, up/down) — essentially, anything one can accomplish with the scroll bars, you can do with the hand tool by dragging the document around. It’s a nice shortcut.
The second use (and the source of my frustration) of the Hand Tool is the zoom function. When the Hand Tool is over content within the document (text, images, etc. — from what I can tell, anything other than the margin) it zooms the viewing scope of the document. For example, if I am at 100% zoom and I click with the Hand Tool when it’s in zoom mode, it may jump to 125%.
The problem is that I don’t want it at 125%. I want it at 100%, which is why I previously zoomed to that level.
The Hand Tool mouse pointer changes depending on mode (click/drag/move, click/zoom) so one can tell what action one is about to commit. However, should one click on the document when the Acrobat window is not in focus, the click registers in the current mode: if the click is over a margin, it acts as a click/drag/move, which is fine since it will have no real noticeable affect on the document. However, if the click is over content, it acts as a click/zoom. The problem is that you can’t tell what mode you’re in when the Acrobat window isn’t in focus. The mouse pointer is simply a mouse pointer, with no Hand Tool mouse pointer changing depending on where the cursor tracks.
This is very annoying. Inevitably, I end up zooming in my Acrobat document when I merely want to bring the window into focus.
This is a perfect example of why the default tool selected in an application shouldn’t serve two uses like this. Keep it simple and consistent. This is particularly bad when Acrobat is supposed to be an easy application for non-techies to be able to use.
