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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictionsOkular, Debian, and copy restrictionsPosted Jun 3, 2009 18:06 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)In reply to: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions by sepreece Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions
"Well, what about the goals of the other users - the ones who wrote and distributed the documents?"
What about them? They're users of other software, not Okular. Okular should cater to the needs and wants of its own users. If others want to set these bits in documents they write, their authoring software should likewise allow them to do so.
As I said, it would be reasonable to passively inform the user that these bits are set. Describing the content of a document is, after all, Okular's primary purpose. It is the fact that Okular actively resists its users' obvious intent which I find objectionable. It goes against the entire spirit of Free Software, which is that users should have full control over the software they use.
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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions Posted Jun 3, 2009 18:18 UTC (Wed) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]
"It is the fact that Okular actively resists its users' obvious intent
which I find objectionable."
What on earth are you talking about? Okular provides a toggle for the
I hit this "problem" during my first day of using KDE4, which uses Okular.
Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions Posted Jun 3, 2009 19:25 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
I am aware of the toggle setting, which was cleverly hidden in a non-default page of the application settings dialog. The error message does not mention that this behavior can be disabled (short of editing the code), much less where to find the controls. It would be reasonable to assume that having gone out of their way to block such behavior the developers would make their restrictions as difficult as possible to circumvent; ergo, many wouldn't even go looking for such an option.
Furthermore, while you and I might not have any issues locating it without help, that would not be true for many of Okular's other users. A surprising number of computer users find themselves intimidated by standard configuration dialogs, and those unfamiliar with (or insecure in their knowledge regarding) software design could easily find themselves wondering whether disabling the restrictions might have unwanted, and possible irreversible, side-effects.
In short, the default assumption should be that users both know what they are doing and have all the necessary authority to do it, unless they deliberately disavow such knowledge or authority. On that basis, the default setting should have been to ignore any restriction requests present in the document, aside from possibly displaying them unobtrusively to the user.
"That's utterly trivial compared to, say, figuring out how to make Gnome honor my intent as a user to respond to single right-mouse clicks rather than double left-mouse clicks."
Perhaps so, but there is a world of difference between presenting a default interface which, while full-featured, may not match a specific user's preferences, and going out of one's way to completely disable standard functionality.
Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions Posted Jun 3, 2009 22:22 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It's reasonable to assume that if you're intimidated by complex
configuration dialogs, KDE is not the desktop for you :)
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