size of the screen in an idividual tab zooms in
I am usually off doing something else or even in bed when all of a sudden I hear grrrrrrmmph! or something similar from my wife. It's the usual "I was just typing and all of a sudden the screen is too big and I can't put it back to the right size!!" Of course it's followed by "I didn't do anything". If four or five tabs are active then one or possibly two tabs are very large and the others are fine. I can get the screens back to normal by hitting Control & Minus together. So pilot error would seem to be the issue here. Yet looking at the keyboard the accidental pressing of those keys looks looks like it's hard to do, especially repeated presses (some of the larger screens are truly super large!). Is there a combination click that possibly includes the touch pad that would give the same result as Control & Plus? It's a new (less than a week) Aspire E15 and she is not very self aware when it comes to paying attention to the absolute details of what she might be doing to cause this anomaly, not even when troubleshooting. Of course the keyboard is "the same only different" than the Toshiba it replaces, and it's the first computer in the house with a full touch pad and no mechanical "mouse" buttons. These could easily lead to some weird key press combinations so I was wondering if there were other combinations of key presses that would give the same result as Control & Plus.
Modified by pjd813
All Replies (3)
Quite likely the touchpad has a zoom feature. Touchpad features differ slightly between machines. Some accept two or 3 finger gestures. Some have no phisical right and left buttons. Some have a zoom|scroll; edge|zone. I frequently have problems when typing on machines with a touchpad, where the cursor jumps around.
The solution is to disable the touchpad whilst doing a lot of typing. Use cursor keys for pointer control instead, or connect a USB|Bluetooth mouse.
There is probably a keyboard shortcut to toggle the touchscreen on and off.
The key board shortcut Ctrl+0 resets zoom to 100% on Firefox. Firefox remembers last used zoom settings on a per site basis.
Thanks for the quick reply... I looked at the touchpad settings and I disabled everything except the right and left click. I had already knocked down the sensitivity and turned off the tap to select option but I didn't turn off the multi finger and swipe options. They are now off since they are nice but not needed here. Especially if they cause confusion. I will report back after my wife spends some time working with the new settings.
Goodluck, you have probably cracked the problem.
As I mentioned before options and features vary, but my solution is a cheap usb mouse and disable the touchpad entirely. That lets me type without worrying about what the touchpad will pickup, and at the same time gives me easy options for navigating and zooming if needed.
You obviously have a better solution for your own or your wife's specific problem.
From my experience this type of problem seems to be known about by those that use desktop computers at work and travel with laptops, but seems to baffle those that only use laptops. They blame the software because they see an intermittent problem only on whatever program they use to do intensive typed input on & their peers tend to use touchscreen devices and have not encountered the problem so blame Firefox | MS Office | Libre Office or whatever.