Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 7:43 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
In reply to: Applications and bundled libraries by djao
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

I use acrobat reader at work - as Okular can't be installed that easily on
windows if you don't have admin rights ;-)

But I find Okular far superior to adobe's product, mostly in the UI
department. Acrobat is just horrible, while Okular has 95% of the features
yet a clean and efficient interface. Just try using your mouse to scroll
through a page - when you hit the bottom of the page, things stop in
Acrobat. Okular just goes on, you won't even notice such features but they
matter once you have to go back to Acrobat.

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Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 8:15 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (6 responses)

When I use Acrobat Reader, scrolling past the end of a page brings the top of the next page within view, and it displays both the bottom of the previous page and the top of the next page in a continuous scroll, similar to evince and okular. It certainly does not just "stop", unless the page in question happens to be the last page in the document, in which case all the other PDF readers also stop. The scrolling behavior of Acrobat Reader is configurable: Edit -> Preferences -> Page Display -> Automatic (or Single Page Continuous).

Perhaps you're using an old or misconfigured version of Acrobat Reader?

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 9:46 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (5 responses)

I didn't mean using the scrollwheel but the dragging function. Click, drag - you'll have to let go at the bottom of the page, go up again and drag again. RSI, here I come!

In Okular you can just scroll on, no extra movements needed. It's a small touch, extremely intuitive and I only figured out I was using it when someone pointed it out ;-)

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 18:33 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (4 responses)

In my version of Acrobat Reader (9.3.1 Linux), I cannot reproduce the behavior you describe. No matter how I scroll the document (scroll wheel, dragging the scrollbar, dragging the main page with the hand tool), the program scrolls continuously past the end of a page to the beginning of the next, without stopping.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 21:34 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not about the page, it is about the mouse. If you grab the page with
the mouse (keep left mouse button pressed) you can drag it to the bottom
of the screen. But then the dragging stops, doesn't it, as you've reached
the bottom of the screen... But in Okular, you can continue to drag
because it 'wraps' the screen by moving the mouse to the top of the screen
and you just drag on.

It's tiny, hard to understand (clearly) if you haven't seen it, yet
completely intuitive and unobtrusive. Just a nice touch.

Similarly nice is finding stuff in Okular, btw. I find the search bar on
the left, which only shows the pages where the search results show up so
you get a quick overview of where the term you were looking for is, far
superior to Acrobat's approach. Acrobat lacks such a simple yet effective
search - you have to go through everything with F3.

Also the automatic scrolling (shift-arrow down) is very nice, I've used
Okular a lot to read from the screen, adjusting speed with the arrow keys
(shift-arrow, again). Press shift to stop scrolling, shift again to
continue. Space to move one page further, shift-space to go back. Sure,
Acrobat offers auto scrolling with the mouse, like word and most
webbrowsers, but it's far less nice imho.

Again, tiny differences, but as I don't use any of the advanced stuff but
just read and search for stuff (and annotate sometimes) Okular is perfect.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 22:17 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

what I've seen is that when you try to drag outside the window, it gets interpreted as a scroll request and the window starts scrolling until you move the mouse back into the window area.

I don't know if this is implemented by the window manager or by the individual app.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 22:22 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (1 responses)

I have okular installed here (Fedora 12) and I cannot reproduce the behavior you describe.

One problem is that, most of the time, when I'm scrolling through a PDF, I want to read the pages from the top down (i.e. scroll forward through the file). However, in order to scroll forward by dragging the main page with the left mouse button, the mouse cursor itself actually has to move up in order for the page content to move down. So my mouse cursor never hits the bottom of the screen like you describe, unless I'm scrolling backwards, which happens very rarely. When I scroll forward, the cursor hits the top of the screen, and when it hits the top, it certainly doesn't automatically wrap the cursor to the bottom.

Since I cannot reproduce this behavior, I have to make certain assumptions about what you mean. Assuming you meant that the mouse cursor wraps from top to bottom, I can see how it would be a worthwhile option, but I would never use it myself. Most of my pdf reading occurs on a laptop, with a touchpad, in which case dragging the page is worse than useless -- it requires holding down a button as well as moving a finger along the touchpad, whereas the scrollwheel is built in to the touchpad and only requires moving a finger along the touchpad, and thus involves strictly less work. The only time I use dragging is for fine (pixel-level) scrolling control that cannot be achieved with the scroll wheel, but in such cases wraparound is unnecessary.

In addition to the lack of utility, my own opinion is that the bottom of the screen should be an absolute boundary to movement, not an invitation to wrap the cursor around to the top of the screen, no matter how worthy the justification may be. Moreover, if the PDF is displayed in a window, rather than full screen, then automatic cursor wraparound would be even more jarring, as it would jump from the top of the window to the bottom of the window rather than the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 17:06 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Interesting. Yes, you understood what I meant, it's strange that you can't reproduce it. Maybe it does depend on the windowmanager used. Either way, I haven't used it in a while now - I did use it when reading lots of PDF's while doing research for a paper. I vividly recall how I disliked Acrobat, as it was far less nice to use for reading. I actually went home behind my own computer screen to read, rather than doing it at work (where I only had windows available).

But I guess everyone's habits are different, as are preferences ;-)

I just wanted to illustrate a very small yet nice feature Okular has which makes it (to me) nicer than Acrobat. It has more of those, of course ;-)