Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment [LWN.net]

Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

Posted Jul 4, 2012 19:26 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment by thedevil
Parent article: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

I don't know for sure if the above also applies to Okular but I suspect it does, with the obvious substitution of Qt for Gtk.

Okular is really a pretty good PDF viewer. It used to be much more usable than Adobe Reader until Adobe Reader learned to re-load PDF files that had changed while being displayed. It does thumbnails, tables of contents and PDF forms. It does side-by-side display of pages. It's quite fast. It does selections as text or graphics. It does annotations. It has a fairly nice presentation mode. It will even read your document to you. It is in fact one of the more obvious reasons to use KDE in the first place.

I use Okular every day and I'm pretty sure I haven't started Adobe Reader for three months or so – there's no need.

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Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

Posted Jul 4, 2012 20:30 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I'll see whether I can answer these. I have nothing to do with the program other than as a satisfied user, though.

1. Some very common actions (such as jumping to a particular page) have no keyboard bindings.

As far as I can see most of the usual actions do have keyboard bindings (usually Ctrl+Something). »Go to page« is Ctrl+g.These can be customised by the user through a reasonably obvious interface.

2. What keyboard bindings there are consist of multiple modifier keys so relief from carpal-stressing mouse handling is slight.

Most of the keyboard bindings use only one modifier (Ctrl). Again, these can be customised.

3. Making the preceding points worse, tab order in the interface is inconsistent or wrong.

As far as I can see the tab order looks reasonable.

4. There is no browser-like breadcrumb feature - you cannot visit a different place in the document and then return with a simple click or keystroke.

Okular does that. The »go back« feature is Ctrl+Shift+Left, so it's not a »simple« keystroke, but that could be changed in about 1 minute. One might also want to add a »go back« icon to the toolbar, which again is a fairly simple customisation.

5. (A pet issue of mine) When reading a document with bookmarks, the page view and the bookmark view are not synchronized. Meaning when you go to a spot by clicking on a bookmark, then do a couple of page-up or page-down in the page window, then you switch back to the bookmark window and hit a key, you're dumped to where you started.

It looks like Okular fails that one, then. It does show you where you are in the bookmarks window, though, and tracks your position among the bookmarks if you move around in the page view. Only if you hit a key in the bookmark view that moves you relative to whichever bookmark was selected last.

Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

Posted Jul 13, 2012 21:26 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

And for a recent release of Evince:

1. Some very common actions (such as jumping to a particular page) have no keyboard bindings.

"Go to page" is Ctrl+L. Most common actions seem to have keybindings (but "common" might be a personal thing).

2. What keyboard bindings there are consist of multiple modifier keys so relief from carpal-stressing mouse handling is slight.

Seems like all shortcuts require at most 1 modifier.

Also, if you have physical problems, I suggest you look into the a11y configuration for your distro/desktop (as I did recently).

3. Making the preceding points worse, tab order in the interface is inconsistent or wrong.

This would require more information about what you consider wrong or inconsistent, as I don't use that much (probably best as a bug report). I assume tab order is also important for e.g. blind people who have to rely on a screen reader like Orca.

4. There is no browser-like breadcrumb feature - you cannot visit a different place in the document and then return with a simple click or keystroke.

There is a button for that which you can add to the toolbar. I don't know about a keystroke.

5. (A pet issue of mine) When reading a document with bookmarks, the page view and the bookmark view are not synchronized. Meaning when you go to a spot by clicking on a bookmark, then do a couple of page-up or page-down in the page window, then you switch back to the bookmark window and hit a key, you're dumped to where you started.

Seems like it doesn't update the bookmark view indeed. You might want to submit a feature request bug to improve this (or provide a patch yourself).