[bug] Dissapearing Item Pane when resizing

alx359

This has been happening for the last 4-5 updates or so of Zotero 7.0.x (Win10).

When attempting to drag and resize vertically the Item Pane beyond a certain height (in Stacked View), it just disappears (list of items mostly consist of pinned attachments). The only way to get it back is from View > Layout > Item Pane.

dstillman

If you're in Stacked mode and you drag the splitter above the item pane downward to shrink the item pane, it will collapse at a certain minimum height. After that you just need to click one of the section buttons at the bottom to reopen it. It's the same as the minimum width in Standard mode.

If you don't think that's what you're seeing, can you provide a screen recording, either here or in an email to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?

alx359

Indeed, clicking one of the sections buttons below does reopen the Item Pane. Didn't occur to me to do that before.

However, it still feels odd and confusing the said panel just disappearing after a certain height. One would expect the splitter to just resize the panes at any desired height, to show more or less of the corresponding upper and bottom panes, as is the expected behavior with any other Windows multi-pane application I've worked before.

Anyway, I'm sending to your email a link to the recorded interaction, for your consideration.

Thank you for your quick reply and feedback.

dstillman

No, it's a perfectly common pattern to have a minimum width or height below which a pane or window is deemed to no longer provide value, at which point it either stops resizing or collapses. (The main problem with Zotero's current implementation is that it collapses right at the minimum dimension rather than only collapsing after you continue dragging in the same direction for a bit longer, which makes it clearer what happened.)

In this case, I think there's much less justification for a minimum height in Stacked mode than there is for a minimum width in Standard mode, though, so setting a much smaller minimum height makes sense to me. We'll consider that.

alx359

I see. Thank you for your consideration.

00jf

Just to add: this is a change in behaviour from Z6 where the bottom item pane could be resized to be quite small. Now it takes up half the screen. It would be great to be able to resize it to smaller than is possible now. Also small suggestion: the button at the bottom that re-opens the pane should also be able to close it, making the pane easy to quickly open and close (especially if one wants to keep it closed now that it's so big).

Kevin.Russell

"No, it's a perfectly common pattern to have a minimum width or height below which a pane or window is deemed to no longer provide value, at which point it either stops resizing or collapses."

With all due respect, the person doing the "deeming" and the person getting the value should be the same. And the value isn't some impersonal, objective abstraction — it's whatever makes each user's life easier. The way things are now, the "deemer" is some stranger who has no clue how good my eyesight is, what size screen I have, how wide my Zotero window is, what fonts I'm using, what information I find it most useful to see, what my workflow is like, and so on.

In short, some stranger has decided that he knows better than I do what will make my life easier. Some stranger has decided that an item pane narrower than a third of my screen would no longer "provide value" to me. How about I get to make that decision myself?

dstillman

@Kevin.Russell: Framing common UI limits as "strangers deciding what will make my life easier" is bizarre and unhelpful. Zotero represents innumerable decisions over many years about what we think will provide the best user experience. It's perfectly reasonable to want flexibility, but part of our job, as the ones developing and supporting the software, is to protect users from states where text is cut off, buttons disappear, or keyboard/screen-reader navigation stops working properly. That's why certain minimum sizes exist.

We have an open ticket to reduce the minimum height in Stacked mode, which is what this thread is actually about — as I say above, I don't think the current limit makes sense there. It sounds like you're talking about Standard mode, and we don't have any plans to change the minimum width there, but you're welcome to open a new thread and provide a concrete example of how a smaller minimum width would produce a better experience for you. But if that involves buttons getting pushed off-screen, then no, we're unlikely to do that.

For what it's worth, the Zotero 7.1 beta adds a button to the navigation bar to collapse and reopen the item pane (similar to what @00jf asked for above), which might be useful if you find yourself frequently trying to shrink the pane to make more room for the items list.