Navigating by space and space+shift

[sojusnik]

Hi!

First of all I want to compliment the developers, especially Adam Reichold, for creating and improving such an useful pdf viewer! This one really stands out positively in it's simplicity, speed and flexibility!

To make it even better, it would be great to have an opportunity to scroll through the visible area of a document, like it is done in Evince or Firefox. Both use space to move to the next visible area of a document or webpage respectively. With space+shift you can move back. I think that navigating through a document in this way is more intuitve.

Bye!

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello,

Thanks for your suggestions! As it is a simple addition that does not seem to interfere with other functions, I added the necessary shortcuts to the main window and the presentation view, i.e. shift+space will skip to the previous page whereas shift+backspace will shift to the next page.

This should be in the daily builds soon. Testing is appreciated.

Best regards, Adam.

[sojusnik (sojusnik)]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your fast reply.

It would be more convenient to use space and space+shift, like it's done f.i. in Evince. Backspace is too far away from space to use them together effectively.

At the moment, space gets you to the next page, backspace to the previous. But in Evince space gets you to the next visible area of the document, and space+shift gets you back. See Evince for clarification.

Best!

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello again,

You can use space and shift+space to navigate the document as these shortcuts are non-exclusive, i.e. space *and* shift+backspace skip to the next page whereas backspace *and* shift+space skip to the previous page. To scroll by a single screen, page up and page down can be used.

Regards, Adam.

[sojusnik (sojusnik)]

In qpdfview 0.4beta1 "space" still gets you to the next page, but not to the next part of a document, like in Evince. "Space" should not get you to the next page, but simply scroll down to the next part of the document, that was not on the screen before. Shift+Space should get you back again.

Can you comprehend my suggestion?

Best!

[Benjamin Eltzner (b-eltzner)]

As of now, (shift+)space and (shift+)backspace skip back and forth by the page and pageUp and pageDown skip by the screenfull. I think that both should be possible but I don't care much for the exact shortcuts. I just wanted to weigh in, that if (shift+)space and (shift+)backspace are changed such as to skip by the screenfull, some other shortcut is needed to skip by the page.

Regards, Benjamin

[sojusnik (sojusnik)]

I see. Therefore I suggest the following shortcuts:

space: next screenful
shift+space: previous screenful

pageDown: go to next page
pageUp: go to previous page

In a word, you have just to swap the commands.

Thanks in advance!

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello,

We had this discussion on what to use for navigating by page and by screen before and decided to do the way it is. Page up/down for scrolling a single screen is the default for all scrollable views in Qt. In my opinion, the fact that Evince does it differently is not a valid argument.

Your suggestion is welcome and I added the shift modifier because of the distance between space and backspace. But I will not swap the shortcuts.

Regards, Adam.

[sojusnik (sojusnik)]

Hi,

that's a pity because normally space and shift+space are easier to find and more convenient to navigate by. Actually you don't really need the "go to next page" command, because when a page of a document is shown entirely the command "next screen" takes you anyway to the beginning of the following page. Therefore I think, that the navigating by page command is more or less redundant. So I've never used it, because "next screen" does it anyway when pages are not shown in a continuous way.

What do you think about it?

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

I don't think going to the next page is redundant and I use it quite regularly.

Maybe at some point in time, we will add a shortcut editor, but until then, you might have to accept that such choices do not always align exactly with your preferences.

[sojusnik (sojusnik)]

I'm ok with it. Indeed, a shortcut editor would be great!

Thanks you again for your great effort and time!

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

The shortcut editor was just committed and will hopefully hit the daily builds soon, hence almost all shortcuts can now be exchanged or altered in any way imaginable...

[sojusnik (sojusnik)]

Superb! Can't wait to test the new version!