Page Mess-up
The very first project I was assigned in Visual Interface Design during my first semester of graduate school at CMU in 1996 was to redesign the QuarkXpress print dialogs. There were several different dialogs that were accessed individually from the File menu. My solution combined them all in a single dialog where options were grouped based on whether they applied to the page, the printer, or were specific to offset printing. You could choose Print from the File menu and have access to all of the options, rather than having to change a few settings in one dialog, close it, and open another to specify something else.
It still aggravates me today every time I use an application that doesn’t allow me to change the page orientation in the Print dialog. Sometimes a button will be provided that will open the Page Setup dialog where you can do this, but sometimes I still have to cancel out of the Print dialog and select Page Setup in the File menu. Take the Print dialog from the most recent version of Adobe Reader, for example.
It does have an option to “Auto-Rotate and Center”, which orientates the page based on the orientation of the document you are printing—and this is typically what I want to do—but it doesn’t allow me to specify the page orientation otherwise. To do that, it’s another trip to the File menu.
You would think that in 13 years this little problem could be solved.
