qpdfview

suggestions/features

Asked by jowind

Hi Adam,

Congratulations and thank you for this amazing tool – I have already setup QPDF as my 'open with' for PDF docs. However, I still have some suggestions/wishes I believe may help to turn it even better.

First of all, I am using V 0.4.7, which is the one available on my repository, Mint Mate 17.1, 3.13.0-37. Forgive me if those suggestions are already answered or covered on more recent versions.

Being a Tabbed PDF reader is a must for me, as I usually use it to open many docs on the same window. I have been using Foxit, at the Windows time, and Adobe while in Linux, along with QPDF.

1- I did not find a way to change the 'hand tool' into a 'select tool', at least in this version;
2- In the other mentioned readers the Tabs start from the 'edge' of the window – 'above' the outline. Also they are all the same width. That allows you to have more docs at a time (usually I have 7 or 8 open), as well as it turns it more organized/standardized;
3- I would like to have individual option for a doc to have or not outline. Or maybe to set a default of the outline not opening automatically when you have only 'pages' (so you have a wider view already), and the outline open when it has bookmarks menu. Currently your option is outline to all or none;
4- There are some safety settings like 'this document is uncontrolled if printed', in gray on the page background, that do not show up by default on the other readers, but shows on QP and I do not know how to 'disable' it. The reading would be a better experience without this background.

Thank you for your time.

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Adam Reichold
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Best Adam Reichold (adamreichold) said : 		#1

Hello jowind,

thank you for your suggestions. Concerning the individual points:

1 - We currently have only rectangular selection to copy text or images which is triggered by using the "Copy to clipboard" action.

2 - You can tweak the behaviour of the tab bar using the settings, e.g. to spread them out evenly, and much more extensively via an Qt application stylesheet. There are various examples to be found in the mailing list archives at [1]. Even though I am not sure who a non-uniform size limits the number of visible tabs as text will be elided at some point anyway if a lot of tabs are open.

3 - We currently do not this, as we want to limit the memory consumption incurred by the user interface, i.e. we do not want to have separate outline views for each tab, but have all tabs share the outline view. This goes along with the fact we implemented them as top-level dockable views, e.g. similar to the tool bars. So the only way to currently achieve the behaviour described is by tracking the visibility per-tab and adjusting this dynamically which I would like to avoid.

4 - Since qpdfview relies on external libraries to actually render the document content, we probably cannot affect this directly. You could check whether other Poppler-based PDF viewers have such settings, which we could then also implement, but I am not aware of such a thing ATM. Also if you are willing to do more research into the technical background of these artefacts, we could try to develop a patch for Poppler to conditionally hide these markings.

Concerning the first two suggestions, my advice would be to try a different layout of those widgets, e.g. I personally prefer a vertical tab in parallel to the outline view on wide screens. Also maybe undocking the outline view is useful for you?

Please also note that the application is called qpdfview as qpdf [2] is a different program to do quality-preserving processing of PDF documents.

Best regards, Adam.

[1] https://lists.launchpad.net/qpdfview/

[2] http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/

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jowind (jqmr) said : 		#2

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the quick response!

jo