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Viewer, Update and Ideas.
Today I published a new version of the new pdf viewer. I know i'm a little late, because I wanted to publish it sooner. I think the next version will come therefore sooner as planned.
First of all thank you, for your donations to the bountry. The donations so far are really encouraging.
This new version doesnt bring perhaps a lot of features, but some important work has been done.
Scrolling, panning and zooming works now better, and you are not anymore restricted to one single page. That works now indeed better but it will still indeed need more improvements.
The pdf pages are now loaded in a separate thread and stored in a cache. That means, the viewer is now faster but instead it uses more memory.
The viewer is now constructed in such a way, that adding support for new file types, will be easier, and not everything will have to be rewritten (code reuse).
I guess in the next version the viewer will support also "XPS" files.
A real ribbon interface I didnt make so far (but I will later), because I think that at the moment the compact interface that I made is better suited.
There is still a lot to do, and I would welcome and suggestions and feature requestes. I'm happy about any suggestio/hint/ideea because I really want that we have a very good pdf viewer (and editor as much as mupdf supports it), which can compare to the more famouse ones working on windows.
Please dont hesitate, any ideea is welcome.
Comments
Performance is excelent however, very fast, very smooth. I would take some additional ram useage for that level of perfomance !
Thank you again for the hardwork.
Any plans for editing and creating PDF's files ?
Making many UI features useable with right click would be a big plus. Also zooming with a click of the mouse wheel to come in and out of zoom mode would beappreciated, otherwise it has most of the needed functionality right now, minus printing AFAIK and a way to skip or jump to pages.
I am very impressed with the progress made in such a short time.
At the moment, you can write your page-number in that white fild and press enter to get to a certain page.
Later you will have on the sidebar an tumbnail list with the pages, you will be able to select the page you want.
Related to skipping:
How do you imagine the skipping to work?
For example you see the green arrow, and i was thinking, that for example when the left/right buttons (the big green ones) are pressed and hold pressed then the document could go to "first/last page" or long presses could skipe pages (let's say 10) again and again till the usser releases that button.
I am not entirely sure how to do page skipping, but the mouse wheel is a common scroll tool used by many to advance through a document. IMHO is needs some acceleration becuase you really have to spin the snot out of it to get down the page.
A right click "goto page" dialog would be nice.Obviously since some pdf's can be hundreds of pages a small popout that allows you to type page numbers would be great.
Try to imagine using the program with only a mouse. That should give you a good frame of refrence for most PC users.
Another useful feature, I wish any PDF viewer had would be tabbed browsing. IE I can select to open a page in a new tab. For instance I would be using a large catalog with many thousands of pages, I might want to open page 267, but I would have to move away from the glossary,index, etc to do so. If I could right click ----> oepn page number 234 in new tab. That would be awesome !
Will the PDF veiwer be able to handle the newer pdf's that have menus etc in them as interactive features ? That would also be much appreciated.
This will be a problem for the beginning, because mupdf doesnt support that for now. I have been talking a little with the guys from mupdf and they say at the moment they have some other priorities.
BePDF is opensource, and it's probably much easier to update the engine.
Yes, I also took a look at BePDF, but I dont like that it doesnt have a more modern look and feel.
Sadly just at the moment i'm very busy with something else, but getting the functionlity of BePDF is not that much work.
I want to spend time to make some new UI elements, like pop-up-image-menu (a more genearl pop-up menu, which can have also text, and not just text), sadly those pop-up menus can not be transparent for now.
I guess already some stuff in the viewer is already more general, in the sense that it will take advantage of code reuse so that adding support for other file types as (djvu, xps, and so on) will be less work then in normal case.
At the moment I can not release a new version, but I show a screenshot of the little improvements.
On right click a pop-up-circle-menu appear and the user can choose the button to click.
And the other improvement is, that on the left side in one of the tabs one has a "preview" of the whole document which one can scroll/pan and if you double click on a page in the "preview" then the document jumps to that page.
How do you like the idea of such a circle-menu (for right click)?
Then you can get feedback and if people are actually using it you can consider releasing the library for others to use.
I know that a consistent UI is important to haiku (especially to axeld), but i think it could be a first try to show that perhaps we could start going away from that "gray - era" with many text-menues which even dont support adding an icon to each menu-item.
IMO every app should use the standard API elements. It can be different if it's about the lack of some type of control. Then you may think of designing something that fits in, and maybe even try to get it included in the standard API. A context menu, however, isn't such a case IMO.
Regards,
Humdinger
That means you would prefer a context menu with the text "zoom in" , "zoom out" ,.. and so on...
instead of a translucent menu where you see very big a symbol of a magnifying glass?
In the case of the context menu it also means, you want to zoom in , so you right click , and then search in a small context menu the sentence "zoom in", and then because the magnification is not enough, you press again right click and press again on "zoom in".
In the case of that circle menu, the menu can disappear for clicking on certain buttons/views of the menu, or it can keep open and it disappear when you move the mouse outside the circle area.
That means, you need less clicks to do the same work.
My main problem with the context menu is that it can not take arbitrary bviews as elements, that means you are restricted to text (as far as i remember).
The circle menu just takes any kind of BView and aranges it in the circle. That means the circle-menu can contain all kind of controls (buttons), input-fields.. and anything you can imagine.
The same problem has Boptionpopup. It displays just text when today it's very common to have images, or text in combination with a smybol.
Nope. I'd be totally happy with a toolbar with the most needed functions. Especially zooming would be something I'd probably just click a few times quickly until it suits me.
Regards,
Humdinger
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