[texworks] Wishlist for pdf previewer

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

On 2011-09-25 00:14, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> First of all, I think that a multipage view is quite useful in order
> to check whether right-hand pages have odd numbers (or even numbers in
> Arabic or Hebrew documents), but I never understood what continuous
> view is good for.  I find it rather anoying when PDF files turn it on.

I guess that depends on your way of work, and the files you're working
on. Personally, what I dislike about single page view is the abruptness
when I go from one page to the next. Of course this doesn't apply to
presentations.
But all in all, I guess it's a matter of taste, so both single page and
continuous modes should be supported.

> I agree on what Phil Taylor already said about marquee zoom.  That's
> what I'm using in Adobe Reader quite frequently.

Marquee zoom has already been implemented and works quite well (up to
"insane" magnifications of several 10000%).

>  * A frame should be drawn around the magnifying glass.  I discussed
>    this with Jonathan already in The Hague but he had not enough time
>    to implement it himself.

This is implemented.

>  * The magnified area should make use of the entire window, ATM it's
>    clipped at page boundaries, even if the window is larger than a
>    sheet.  But this is a minor issue, I don't know how difficult it is
>    to implement.

I looked into it a while ago, but it doesn't seem to be straight forward
with Qt, owing to the fundamental differences of window management
across platforms.

>  * If the magnifying glass is configured to have a rectangular shape,
>    it would be nice if there are configurable rulers attached to its
>    borders.  This was implemented in xdvi already.

Would a measurement tool work as well? For starters, this could be as
simple as showing the cursor coordinates somewhere in the status bar,
but could be extended to measure, e.g., the length or angles of lines.
Rulers should be doable as well, but their implementation is probably
not straight-forward when in continuous mode (as different pages may
have different sizes and orientations) and possibly not very helpful on
some cases (e.g., when wanting to measure something in the center of the
page).

>  * The magnifying glass should work with a marquee-zoomed image as
>    well.

Of course it does. Marquee zooming is no different from "normal"
zooming, you only specify the final zoom level and center point
differently. So only your poppler implementation is the limit ;).

Cheers,
Stefan