(I have a second Request: Also, please consider moving the Horizontal Scroll Bar next to the “Timeline”. FYI, below I tell my story in detail because I am not used to being brief and I feel a need to persuade you that my request is valuable from the perspective of an Audacity newbie. I have learned that it is better to put requests first instead of last. That is why I put the second Request up here instead of at the end as an afterthought.)
I have been using Audacity periodically for more than a year. In some ways I am a newbie. I am a software engineer with no recording experience other than tape recording business meetings and using the Pop mute. I have always wanted to be able to scroll horizontally through a recording, but have never seen any documentation on how to do this. I grant that I have not read the Reference Manual from front to back. But today I finally got frustrated that I could not find any way to scroll horizontally. I thought that there must be a way. So I leaned in and searched the Reference Manual. I looked through all the beginning sections. I could not see anything about it. Finally I looked in the Shortcuts and found the following sentence:
“PAGE UP scrolls the project rightwards and PAGE DOWN scrolls the project leftwards, equivalent to a single click in the white area either side of the horizontal scrollbar.”
I tried PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN, but on my keyboard they seemed to be ignored. But the sentence clued me in that there is a horizontal scrollbar. So I searched the Audacity GUI screen for something that might be a horizontal scrollbar. “Oh, down there”, I said when I found it. Finally, after more than a year, that nondescript part of the screen (far below where I had been focusing and which I had never noticed) had a purpose. It had never stood out to me as more than a border of a rectangle. Once you see it, it is obvious. But since I did not know it existed until today and was focused on the “Timeline” part of the screen, I missed it.
Scrolling is usually done with the mouse and the scrollbar at the bottom.
PageUp/PageDown for scrolling horizontally is completely illogical.
If you needed a year to find the horizontal scroll bar, it is probably time to get some glasses or a different operating system (because the size / appearance of the scroll bar is depending on that).
For the alpha manual for the upcoming 3.7.4 I have added links in the clickable imagemap on the front page of the manual.
Hovering your cursor over that part of the imagemap will display this hovertext tooltip:
Clicking there will take you to this newly created page:
BUT you will only see this once 3.7.4 is released as I cannot update any previously released version of the manual.
Peter
