More than two pages to display

[Martin Palenik]

There is an option (CTRL+6 or View->Two pages) to show two pages at once, one on the left and one on the right of the viewer. On bigger screen it is usually a waste of space to show only two of them. I would like to be able to see at least three or more pages inside one horizontal block.

[Benjamin Eltzner (b-eltzner)]

Hi and thanks for your input. I am however afraid that the feature you suggest will not be of high priority. The two pages mode is mostly thought for documents that are layouted as a two-page spread, a benefit that would not directly carry over to a view with more than two columns. At the same time, implementing such a feature would take some time that would probably rather be spent on other improvements. In summary, I do not see a reason to principally oppose the feature from the usage point of view but it probably does not agree well with the current code structure.

[Martin Palenik (slovenskyweb)]

I agree this would be generally useless for documents. One reason though might be reading of the slides from a presentation/lecture. These usually contain very little information/text per slide and considerably larger letters than a book. As a student I have to use these as a learning material. It is rather cumbersome to have to scroll for the information, when I know two more slides could easily fit there giving me much better overview about the subject. Another reason might be the large LCD monitors. Viewing slides on these two-page spread is just pain in my opinion. I know that Foxit can show multiple-page spread, but under the linux environment I consider qpdfview to be far superior.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

I do see you use case which Benjamin pointed out to me as well. I will think about it. But it will take some time to sort out ideas before I can decide on the matter. Please don't hold your breath.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

I started implementing this. But it will not land in 0.3.5 will brings enough issues to test for with it, i.e. SyncTeX integration.

Nevertheless you can check out the initial implementation in the Bazaar branch "lp:~adamreichold/qpdfview/multiplepages" which adds a "multiple pages" layout mode. The number of pages per row can be set in the settings dialogue on the "Graphics" tab. Please test this extensively. Thanks.

P.S.: You can get a tarball of the source at "https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~adamreichold/qpdfview/multiplepages/revision/head:" if you do not want to use Bazaar. If you need help building the program, feel free to ask here.

[Martin Palenik (slovenskyweb)]

Hello. I just tried it and it works flawlessly! I tested it on my 19" notebook HP 4730s as well as on my 24" LCD and there are no problems. Also on Pivot it works fine. Test was performed on Fedora 17. Thank you.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Nice to know that it works. Of course, it'll have to wait for 0.3.6 as the code needs to mature and we need to check for regression in the other layout modes as well. That means trunk resp. the daily builds will probably pick it up in about two weeks.