This is a very interesting puzzle. Sorry my reply is so long, I didn’t want to just jump to my follow-up questions without showing my working (spot the scientist).
You sort of have two questions really in this thread:
- Why is Freeform unexpectedly zooming out?
- Why is my scale in Freeform so weird? (My words, not yours!)
Why is Freeform zooming out?
I set a label to font size 144 (like your board) on three different boards and all three boards then open at zoom scale 10%. I can’t tell if this is a deliberate choice by Freeform’s developers or a bug - it is the only font size that seems to be resetting the zoom when you open a board (other boards remain the previous zoom you were at), but it may be because the font is so large that Freeform is programmed to resize zoom and make the board legible on first open. This question is a red herring though so you can ignore this and go to question 2!
Why is my scale in Freeform so weird, or: why is my font so large?
To troubleshoot the “image first” theory, I’ve opened a new board. It defaults to 100% scale (which makes sense). If I add an image, the app sizes it and the scale of the board doesn’t change (I am not changing the image size - I am assuming Apple is doing what it thinks is right). The default text size for adding a note is 18 in a text box and 18 in a post-it. For me, this makes the text too large next to an image, like so:
If I open a new board and zoom to 50% scale, then add an image, Apple is resizing the image to the new scale (this is important - it means Apple is setting a standard size for images and altering the zoom doesn’t change that).
I’ve experimented with a few different images of different original sizes, and starting with a board zoomed to different scales, and in all cases images drop into a new board at “10 dots wide” along their longest edge. So that seems to be the measure Apple works to.
After pondering this issue a while and looking at my own boards, I appear to have unconsciously hovered around what Apple’s defaults image and font size are. My images are larger than the default size they load at, and my font size has decreased to 10. I’ve not “consciously” thought about staying near Apple’s defaults, but it seems to be what’s happened. Most my images have been resized to 14-20 dots depending on the level of detail I wanted to see at first glance.
If your font size is 144, your images must be huge? So my questions back to you would be:
- When you first add an image to a board, before you do any resizing, is it taking up more than 10 “dots”? (This would suggest Freeform hasn’t resized the image for some reason, which I assume is a bug with the app given my tests.)
- If it is sizing the image to 10 dots on first load, are you resizing it to make it really big? If the answer is yes, I think this might be “unexpected behaviour”. Assuming Freeform’s font numbering follows the conventions of other on-screen writing, you probably wouldn’t want general body text or labels to be outside font sizes 10-30 depending on what you were up to, and you should resize your images to match this.
