Bug 293109 - Enable form filling in presentation mode
Summary: Enable form filling in presentation mode
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: okular
Classification: Applications
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Platform: Arch Linux Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Okular developers
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-02-02 01:33 UTC by reescf
Modified: 2013-08-05 00:13 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Latest Commit:
Version Fixed In:


Attachments
Schematic: use of form elements of different kinds within a beamer slide set (611.53 KB, application/pdf)
2013-07-23 01:21 UTC, reescf
Details

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Description reescf 2012-02-02 01:33:34 UTC
Version:           unspecified (using KDE 4.8.0) 
OS:                Linux

Okular has several features which I really like including:
- straightforward presentation mode;
- ability to fill out forms and save the result.

However, it is not currently possible to combine these features because Okular does not allow the filling of forms in presentation mode. Clicking in the text box does what clicking elsewhere does - it advances to the next slide.

I'm requesting this feature here because Okular is the closest I've found to being able to do what I need. However, I'm not a developer and I don't know how easy implementation would be.

acroread does allow filling forms out in presentation mode but unfortunately it doesn't allow saving the result.

The reason this is useful is because I use beamer to create slides. When the slides are for use in class, I often include text boxes which I fill in on the basis of student responses. This means that beamer-produced presentations can be tailored so that they do not encourage the passivity which powerpoint etc. sometimes does. (If the answer's on the next slide, why bother answering the question yourself?)

It is really nice if I can save the filled-out form and post it online so that students can go back to the completed version later. When I've taught the same material to multiple groups, I've typically ended up with as many versions online as I have groups. The initial slides are the same but the different groups have different ideas and questions, so the completed slides vary.

It would be fantastic if an open source viewer allowed me to do this. It would also allow me to teach classes using free software. At the moment everything is produced using free software but what the students see in use is the acroread binary blob.

I do appreciate that this may not be a feature in great demand but I figure it cannot hurt to ask!

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Get a PDF form.
Open in Okular.
Enable form-filling.
Switch to presentation mode.

Actual Results:  
Clicking in a text box in the form advances to the next slide.

Expected Results:  
Clicking in a text box would enable you to type in the text box, to fill out the form.

Note: I'm guessing that the behaviour I'm seeing maybe a feature and so not really a bug. But I'm hoping this is because nobody imagined anybody would want to fill out a form in presentation mode and may therefore reconsider it in the light of the (hopefully compelling) use-case presented in this report.
Comment 1 reescf 2012-11-02 00:57:18 UTC
May I ask whether this would actually be hard to implement? That is, is the reason it fails to work in presentation mode due to some sort of glitch or oversight or would enabling it actually be a new feature?

I ask because I can see why you might not think it worth enabling it if it would be a genuinely new feature. (I wish you would but I admit there's a certain dearth of wild clamouring for it.)

If, on the other hand, it is more-or-less chance that it doesn't work at present and it would be easy to fix, it would be simply superb to be able to use okular in front of my students. (I guess right now they probably assume I use windows because acroread is pretty much all they see.)
Comment 2 Albert Astals Cid 2012-11-02 18:55:12 UTC
Presentation mode is for presentations, if you want to fill forms you are not doing a presentation, full screen mode might be what you really want.
Comment 3 Albert Astals Cid 2013-03-10 20:25:35 UTC
As stated in comment 2 i don't see why we should provide this feature in presentation mode, if you can give me a good reason please reopen the bug.

Thanks a lot for caring about Okular :-)
Comment 4 reescf 2013-07-23 01:21:55 UTC
Created attachment 81280 [details]
Schematic: use of form elements of different kinds within a beamer slide set
Comment 5 reescf 2013-07-23 01:32:32 UTC
Eek! Adding an attachment deletes unsaved comments?!

OK. I just wrote a very detailed explanation of why full screen mode isn't right here. Short version: it does not treat the document as consisting of slides to be presented one after another, uncovered incrementally and so on. Instead, it treats them as pages of a document. I don't want to scroll through my slides when I'm presenting. All the usual presentation conventions apply - my slides are just more interactive than most.

Moreover, presentation mode automatically adjusts the slide to the display dimensions; full screen mode just cuts stuff off. Presentation mode hides menu bars, tools etc. automatically; full screen mode does not. Presentation mode does not alter the default viewing set up of all my other pdfs; full screen mode apparently does.

Basically, full screen mode is not suitable for a presentation and presentation mode is. These are presentations - slides - and not regular documents. Even if I adjusted the page dimensions to exactly scale, it would render my slides hardware specific and that's no good. (Not even sure you can do this with the beamer package.)

Perhaps an example will help. Please find a schematic attached which I created for another developer working on a different viewer. This was created with the beamer latex package and features various form elements. It is also very clearly a set of slides designed as a presentation. (At least, it would be if it were not so schematic.)

If you cannot or choose not to implement this feature, that's fine. But please do not tell me that what I "really want" is full screen mode. It is not.
Comment 6 Albert Astals Cid 2013-07-23 18:27:25 UTC
After opening that file I still don't understand why you would need to fill in the forms while doing a presentation, can you explain?
Comment 7 reescf 2013-07-27 21:30:04 UTC
Basically, I use form fields to write up the results of class discussion. So, for example, I might have a regular slide with some information followed by a slide with a question for discussion and a form box. Until the students discuss it and respond, I don't know what should go in that box. But it is still part of the presentation and belongs on a slide - it is not supposed to be like the page of a form which you scroll through. And then the next slide might have a block defining a related concept and an example with an image or something. And then the next one might be a diagram followed by a slide with another form field where I can jot notes in response to students' comments and questions about that week's reading.

It is just a method to make the presentation less passive and more interactive and to be more responsive to questions and comments which a particular group of students generate. So although the slides all exist in advance and although the content of many of them is fixed (just as it would be in a powerpoint-type slide set), the content of some of them is only decided as we work through the slides and depends very much on the actual concerns of the students in that particular class. So if I give the same presentation to two groups of students, I'll end up with two different sets of slides. That is, each will have the same number of slides and the slides will be structured in the same way but the content of some of those slides will differ because I'll get different input from the students.

One of the problems with powerpoint-type presentations is passivity: why bother answering a question if you know the answer is on the next slide? That can be avoided if the answer is not (yet) on the next slide just as, if you were using a traditional blackboard, the answer would not (yet) be chalked up. It also undermines the idea that discussion and student input isn't important: if only what I write in advance gets beamed up in full colour, there is a tendency to think that must be the most important stuff. What people then merely ask or say in class looks less important. But forms let me put that stuff up as well thus reflecting its value.

It is the interactivity which is important. Form-filling is a way to achieve that interactivity. The reason I do it that way is because the LaTeX beamer package includes commands which allow you to use elements of forms within slides. Since that's what I use to produce my presentations, that's the mechanism I use for building in interactivity. I don't know if that was the intended purpose of that functionality in beamer or if it was originally intended for something else but either way it makes it very easy to create interactive presentations which encourage active participation in class.

Of course, I don't always use this - if I'm giving a professional presentation, I just use "regular" slides. But for teaching purposes, the possibility of building in interactivity is a really big advantage of using beamer. And it works much better when it is part of a regular slide than when people try to just make documents full screen which always looks messy and tends to be distracting for the audience. Beamer's ability to build it into proper slides is really slick and very nice but it does require a pdf viewer which lets you fill in a form while in presentation mode.

Does this make any more sense? I feel like I'm going to have to invite you to class (!) as I'm obviously not doing a very good job of explaining this, for which I apologise.
Comment 8 Albert Astals Cid 2013-07-28 15:14:53 UTC
Ok, fair enough.

Don't think we'll have time anytime soon for this but it makes sense now.

As always patches or money to hire developers welcome :-)
Comment 9 reescf 2013-08-05 00:13:16 UTC
OK. Glad it is clear, anyway.

Unfortunately, I (literally) don't earn enough to survive let alone hire developers...