Tip: using Touch to zoom

I was looking through various posts about OneNote and noticed several folks had wanted the ability to pinch to zoom turned on or off, and were wondering if this was possible to toggle with OneNote from the Windows 8 store. The answer is yes and here is how.

Start OneNote and swipe in from the right to open the Charms bar
Select Options
And here is the setting:

Use touch to zoom is the name of the control. You can turn it on or off here.

A reason we expose this rather than leave it always on (or off) is palm rejection. That refers to the ability of the hardware to detect that your palm is resting on the screen when you are using a stylus to write. Some hardware does a really good job at this - in fact, all the Windows 8 machines we tested detect and reject palms well. In this case, you can turn On this setting and pinch to zoom just like you want.

One of my older test machines - from about four years ago - does not do well with palm rejection. On that machine, I turn this Off to avoid odd scrolling or zooming behavior when I rest my hand on the screen while using my stylus.

I hope this tip helps.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John