Readme dependencies are poor design practice, in my book.

Except in rare cases, such as: you're running on a device with a pathetically low screen resolution and every pixel counts.

Okay, I have a compromise: If the scale is turned off (as I now have made the default setting in my config.ini), then whatever you do for scale size indication (serifs, dashed bar, whatever) should be correspondingly turned off.

Let me tell you where I'm coming from on this:

I think that the display of the map information should be as uncluttered as possible. When I tried out the TripPilot software on the Palm, one of the deal-breakers for me was the fact that every map on the screen had an unnecessarily large scale marker, along with a "copyright (c) vicinity corp" message. And since the software showed maps of more than one "step" on the screen at the same time, this screen space was wasted more than once on the screen. It was a neat piece of software that delivered great onscreen maps, but little crap like not being able to remove the scale marker and not being able to remove the copyright text prevented me from buying it.