Bug 449283

Summary:	Multiple find bars or delimiter to search for more terms at once
Product:	[Applications] okular	Reporter:	Wing Hong Chan <winghongchan>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Okular developers <okular-devel>
Status:	REPORTED ---
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	htpha
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	21.12.1
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Neon
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Wing Hong Chan 2022-01-28 05:20:34 UTC

SUMMARY
Currently the find bar can only find one phrase. I am wishing for multiple find bars, which I would use in longer documents to see where two phrases appear together (like if the words "happiness" and "satisfaction" are used throughout a document but I want to find a sentence or paragraph that uses both and may explain a correlation). 

Alternate implementations could be to use a delimiting character to separate terms, but a hint to the user that they can use a delimiter would have to be provided. 

This is different from simply typing two words into the find bar, which would only find anywhere the two words appear immediately next to each other. 


STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Open the Find bar
2. Type in a search term

OBSERVED RESULT
I now need to look manually for the other term. I have tried to use delimiters like ',', '&&', ' ', '|' and ':' but they do not work as delimiters to separate search terms. 

EXPECTED RESULT
If it were a feature, I suppose it would highlight all instances of either search term. If only one instance is highlighted at once (like the current behavior), then cycling through results would highlight instances of either term in the order they appear in the document. 

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Linux/KDE Plasma: KDE Neon 5.23
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.90.0
Qt Version: 5.15.3

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Comment 1 htpha 2022-02-18 10:08:21 UTC

This feature is actually already implemented but not for the find bar. If you open your side bar and go to thumbnails you can filter multiple keywords at once and each of them are highlighted in different colors.

To have multiple find bars or having the user to know delimiters is imo too much. The thumbnails filter is also really fast compared to the find bar which is doing a incremental search. When you search the thumbnails a temporal DB is created (I am guessing this cause I am not a Okular dev) which is just a bliss to search a big document multiple times.

Comment 2 Wing Hong Chan 2022-03-02 04:00:19 UTC

(In reply to htpha from comment #1)
> This feature is actually already implemented but not for the find bar. If
> you open your side bar and go to thumbnails you can filter multiple keywords
> at once and each of them are highlighted in different colors.
> 
> To have multiple find bars or having the user to know delimiters is imo too
> much. The thumbnails filter is also really fast compared to the find bar
> which is doing a incremental search. When you search the thumbnails a
> temporal DB is created (I am guessing this cause I am not a Okular dev)
> which is just a bliss to search a big document multiple times.

Thank you! Didn’t know there was that other find bar. I guess the problem isn’t the lack of the feature, it’s just the discoverability of the feature for me, and the perhaps redundancy of having two bars with overlapping features.