Version: 0.8 (using KDE 4.2.0) OS: Linux Installed from: Fedora RPMs Since discovering okular, I am ecstatic about reading pdf and odt documents (I even convert project gutenberg texts into odt immediately), now that I can bookmark the files. As a result, I generally have at least a half dozen books on the go at any given time. This has made me recognize the limitations of the bookmark display in the sidebar. I am not sure how an improvement could be engineered, but the present system of showing the path to a file and the bookmarks under it is tedious. One has to shrink the reading pane and scroll the bookmark display sideways to see the path, click on the '+' to see the bookmark, etc. I think it would be more elegant to have some sort of drop-down menu item, or pop-out from the frame style (see next paragraph), with the path, document name and bookmarks, so as not to take away valuable window real estate. Also, the sidebar is kludgey. It is huge (yes, I know I can, thankfully, make it disappear). Perhaps it could pop in and out of the side edge of the window frame, like konqueror and digikam do with its menus. I hope these suggestions will trigger some thought into making this very useful application yet more pleasurable to use. PS: I don't use adobe reader and never really have, so I do not put any value in trying to mimic their methods. Something unique and based on bauhaus (function defines form), rather than copying a market leader in the vain attempt at increasing usefulness by simply coping an old paradigm, are not my wish or desire. And kde4 is about breaking out of paradigms! What a success so far.
(In reply to comment #0) > I am not sure how an improvement could be engineered, but the present system of > showing the path to a file and the bookmarks under it is tedious. One has to > shrink the reading pane and scroll the bookmark display sideways to see the > path, click on the '+' to see the bookmark, etc. There are tooltips for the items representing files in the bookmarks tree, so you are not forced to enlarge the sidebar. > Also, the sidebar is kludgey. It is huge (yes, I know I can, thankfully, make > it disappear). Perhaps it could pop in and out of the side edge of the window > frame, like konqueror and digikam do with its menus. Right click on it to choose whether show text, and the size for the icons.
I guess you haven't noticed how elegantly it is handled in konqueror and digikam. The menu disappears into the side frame, leaving only a slim icon. And the bookmarks are just raw text, not fully developed icons or menu items or clickable boxes or widgets or what-have-you. This is a wishlist, not a bug report. It is a suggestion of what would make take the program from just works to well thought out.
(In reply to comment #2) > I guess you haven't noticed how elegantly it is handled in konqueror and > digikam. The menu disappears into the side frame, leaving only a slim icon. You can do almost the same thing by disabling text and reducing the icon size to the minimum. The interface as being done in digikam and konqueror is a solution we (with the usability team) did not choose on purpouse. > And the bookmarks are just raw text, not fully developed icons or menu items or > clickable boxes or widgets or what-have-you. I'm not understanding then what you want for bookmarks then. Would you be able to propose a mockup, an ASCII art, or explaining further your idea?
I was just reading some more and it another point came to me, which might serve to clarify what I, as an okular 'power user', would like to see. In the menu bar, there is an entry called bookmarks. Presently, it only shows the bookmarks in the document one is currently reading, yet the sidebar shows the bookmarks of all the documents. It would be a tremendous aid, were the dropdown bookmarks menu able to show a list of all documents for which there is a bookmark, and when hovering the mouse on it, a submenu would open, displaying all bookmarks for that particular document. Firefox, albeit not a kde/qt app, and many others, do this. In firefox, under the bookmarks menu, for example, it has all the functional stuff, like add and organize bookmarks (as does okular presently), and underneath that, it has recent tags, most visited and recently bookmarked, which each open up to show more. I would like to see this in the okular bookmarks menu item, so that all of the documents for which bookmarks exist would be shown there and that they open up to display their bookmarked pages. This should easily fit into the interface solution chosen by your usability team and would increase the usability tremendously.
I am not an artist, but I will try... Go Bookmarks Tools ... Remove Bookmark Previous Bookmark Next Bookmark ----------------- Document #1 Document #2 Document #3 28 - #28 45 - #45 92 - #92 And so on. Each Document would open up to show its bookmarks, like I tried to show for the third document above. Wouldn't this be easy to implement? PS: Thanks for pointing it out: I had tried small icons, but the bar never got smaller because I hadn't un-selected text. Now, it is slimmer and looks better.
I agree with author of the report. If the user has lot of files with bookmarks, for example 30, all what he sees is 30 times /home/user/books/. In this situation it's very hard to find the book he want to read. The user must check tooltip for every file (Comment #1 From Pino Toscano). It's essential to show the book/document name not path to it, because it's the main factor of fast and easy getting bookmark which you want. Also file extension is not needed. This would shorten the label a lot, but if it still doesn't fit into sidebar good idea would be word wrapping as in text editors when there is lot of text in one line.
Also, I would like to see support for reading html and text documents. At present, one must use a browser to read html documents, which is very inadequate. A browser is fine for reading web pages, newspaper articles online, etc, but for reading e-texts, like novels, such as from Project Gutenberg, or instructional texts, where it is necessary to read a section, remember one's place in the file, and resume reading later on, a browser is not suited. Another format that ought to be covered by Okular is plain ordinary text (txt) files. Sure, one can read them in kwrite, but how do you remember the spot you left off, so that you can resume reading at a later time? Kwrite is a text file editor, not a dedicated reader. Again, scads of text files are available, from Project Gutenberg and other sources, that require the ability to conveniently and comfortably read a text and recall the location to come back to at a later time. Okular is a nice reader and makes a great all-in-one solution for reading for learning and for enjoyment. At present, however, all of the important formats that I have encountered are covered by Okular, except the two most important formats of all, html and txt. As a result, I have had to resort to reading html texts with fbreader (it remembers the spot where you left off, although you cannot set multiple bookmarks). I haven't found a solution for text files, except to record the line number in a file I create to manually record my bookmarks. Okular should do this automatically.
Yes, comment #6 from Kamil sums up the difficulty. I constantly have at least 10 books that I am reading at one time (devotional texts, texts in 3 different languages that I read for pleasure, study materials, career development materials, martial arts instructional texts, comic books, bank and credit card statements, etc.) and must hover over each until the tool tip shows up. It is not as convenient as it ought to be.
Hi, I would also like to emphasize the first point the OP made about the sidebar - it wastes a lot of space. I love Okular, its the only KDE app I use in my Gnome environment, and this is the only gripe I have with it. To expand: I read and take notes from a lot of PDFs, and screen space is at a premium when you also have note taking software open as well. I love that the sidebar shows me which page I am on at a glance so I want it open, but the icons for switching between Contents, Thumbnails etc. take up a whole vertical collumn - most of which is empty (yes, even though you can make them quite small). It would be great if these could (optionally?) be moved into the same column as the thumbnails themselves.