Certainly valuable, yes, like a minimap rather than scrolling around. It's technically not feasible, at least not without doing one of two things:
1. Expanding the engine itself to include non-grid-based images, though this wouldn't mesh well with the game because it would be outside the whole game-side animation system.
2. Adding new glyphs that are made up purely of four quadrants that are each either solid or empty, which could at most double the view area, but be limited to a single color and be unable to show any machines or objects, just the layout.
So no ideal solution here... Also, I think it could damage the consistency of the aesthetic, though I'd still be happy to try if there were an easy way. Maybe as a post-1.0 experiment? The only option feasible for the near-term would be a command to output the entire current map to a png (actually already exists, but is just for occasional debugging purposes). Interested? Not too great for continued sessions in fullscreen mode, and I would also hope making that feature available wouldn't become some kind of crutch that ends up annoying players who feel obligated to use it, since it's not a great way to address the whole large-scale mapping issue.
Note that anyone willing to use a smaller font size than their default can increase the map view size. That's how I do map testing myself, with smaller fonts on a large monitor so I can see more, or all, of the floor's layout.
