Mac Scroll Bars

How to always show scroll bars on a Mac

Scroll

You can read this tip on the web at:‎Wondering what happened to the scroll bars on your. Learn about designing apps for iOS. A scroll view allows users to browse content, such as text in a document or a collection of images, that’s larger than the visible area. You can scroll on a Mac using the trackpad, spacebar, keyboard, or a mouse — or change your scrolling preferences. Here's what you need to know.

Scroll

What if you were missing out on web content just because your Mac wasn’t telling you that you could scroll?

It turns out that this is the default on the current version of OS X. So there’s a good chance you are missing content.

Here’s the short and sweet steps to a solution.

  1. System Preferences (from the Apple Menu) > General.
  2. Change the Show scroll bars setting to Always.

The Problem and the Solution in Detail

Here’s a screen capture from a demo that Keith Gilbert created for a lesson he wrote on creating interactivity from InDesign (such as scrolling frames).

Unfortunately, my Mac isn’t giving me any indication that this content is scrollable (even in Firefox, a non-Apple web browser).

The fix is quick if you know where to find it.

Scroll

System Preferences (from the Apple Menu) > General.

Change Mac Scroll Bars

Here’s how Show scroll bars setting typically looks by default (with Automatically based on mouse or trackpad selected).

Yes, a “magic” mouse can cause scroll bars to be hidden with this default setting.

Mac Scroll Bars

Change the Show scroll bars setting to Always. This will force the scroll bars on whenever there is scrolling.

And there’s the scroll bar! The change is typically visible right away.

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Mac Pro Scroll Bars

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Mac Scroll Bar Not Working

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Mac Scroll Bars

Works with the following export formats:

  • EPUB (Reflowable & Fixed Layout)
  • HTML
  • Publish Online
  • DPS
  • in5 HTML5

Related

How To Get The Scroll Bar Back

Short URL:
« Digital Publishing with InDesign: Types of Interactive ElementsHow to Replace an iFrame with a Message When Your Viewer is Offline »

Excel Mac Scroll Bars

I am running OSX 10.9 Maverick on a Macbook Pro . I observe this problem in Firefox 25.1 The scroll bars in any application window all dissapear after about a second. If you resize the window or select an item with subdirectories in a list, the scroll bar in the pane you are in reappears, but it does not dwell long enough to allow you to move a cursor over it. (What is the point of making it dissapear anyway?) Two finger scrolling does not work for some reason, using a function and direction key or just a direction key works to scroll only in some websites but not all of them. This little bit of cleverness, if intentional is both un-needed and dysfunctional.