Word X: Where are the live scrollbars?

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
February 26th, 2003 • 1:35 am

For many years now, windows in the classic Mac OS and later in Mac OS X have featured what is sometimes called a “live scrollbar”, i.e. a scrollbar widget whose size varies depending on the proportion of the entire window contents that is actually visible with the current window size.

For example, in this window:

A picture named LiveScrollBar.jpg

the size of the blue widget in the vertical scrollbar is a little over half the size of the entire space in which it can slide up and down, because I can currently see, in my window, a little over half of the entire contents of this particular window. If I resize the window and make it bigger, the blue widget becomes increasingly bigger as well, until the window is big enough that its entire contents can be seen, in which case the blue widget disappears and the scrollbar becomes disabled.

In Word X, even if I have a blank document that’s completely empty and I can see its entire contents, the blue widget is still active, and it’s the smallest possible size, which bears absolutely no relation to the size of the visible part of the document compared to the size of the entire document.

In short, Word X does not support “live scrollbars”.

Why? Obviously because MS developers have been too lazy to implement it — even though the feature has been available system-wide for several years now.

Typical.


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