Why so much gray space around the page in 'fit width'?

[verity]

I'm starting to learn my way around the OpenOffice Writer interface and I have a couple of small annoyances I'd like to figure out. And I thought this would be the place to voice it. I tried searching with no luck, in these forums and online in general. Any explanations/help would be appreciated.

When I set the view in Writer to 'Fit width' (I believe it was 'Page Width' in 2.x) I think there remains a lot of gray space wasted between edges of the page and window border or rulers. I understand you can right click in that area for a menu and it's needed for a visual impression of the page, but in my mind that doesn't need to be any wider than the amount of gray space in between pages for instance, if that. I usually want to see the whole width to get a better visual idea of where things fall 'in the grand scheme of things' on the page so I'm not a huge fan of the optimal view. And even in the optimal view, why so much gray space above the document and below?

In my experience I'm comparing OOo to Word and Pages and OOo does the worst in this tiny layout optimization that is starting to bug me when I work on my widescreen laptop. I love the two column page layout in the 3.0.0 builds but I see the gray area hasn't decreased in that case likewise. Is there a setting I'm missing in my ignorance?

OOo version: 3.0.0 m4 build 9288 aqua
Mac OS X 10.5.2

Thanks.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

No, you're not missing anything. There is more than enough space (about 1cm each side at fit to width). Find a zoom scale that works for you, record that as a macro, and assign it to a shortcut. In 2.4 there is a status line field from which I can select 150% zoom — that works perfectly on my setup.

If that doesn't help, then take a look at this post: This is not a customer service.

[verity]

Thanks for the macro advice, I might give it a try. Meanwhile I decided I might as well look for this issue or report it. Couldn't find anything, so described it as I see it (issue 87343). I'm really hoping it's a small enough change in code and I'm not whining about something that is more involved than it's worth from a developers' perspective. I see this as a step towards a less ugly UI.