qpdfview team mailing list archive

[Andi Șerbănescu <ac.serbanescu@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I tried the latest beta and I have to say I that although the program
is eminently usable, the interface does require some polishing. All in
all, this is good software, for which I am grateful (and rather
impressed by its progress). The following suggestions should obviously
not be construed as criticism.

1. The toolbars. I think they could use less space.

First, they're too tall. I believe they should be made as short as the
icons allow, like other Qt applications (this also includes the search
bar). They're also too wide.

The page field and the spaces in between could be made narrower, so
that the information would flow naturally (there probably aren't any
documents that need such wide fields anyway); also, replace „of” with
„/” (it's the shorter and doesn't need translating, thus it's the same
length in all languages).

The page layout drop-down list could be successfully replaced with 2
buttons: one to switch between showing 1 or 2 pages on screen and
another one to toggle continuous (column) mode. The same goes for
rotation: one button to cycle between the 4 options would be enough.

The scaling drop-down list should be replaced by 4 buttons: one each
for fit page, fit width, zoom in and zoom out, complemented by a
narrow text field which only displays and reads percentages (again, no
translation needed, so the toolbar size will be wholly
language-neutral).

The extra space (making one toolbar out of these 3 should also save
some) could be used for some new buttons, such as search, full screen,
outline and thumbnails. The search toolbar could be improved by
replacing the text buttons with graphic ones (besides reducing its
height) and adding another icon on the left for closing it.

2. The menus. Nothing special here, except that the page layout,
scaling and rotation options should go under their own submenus, to
avoid making view too long. The page navigation entries would probably
also make more sense under their own submenu in view, rather than
under edit.

Perhaps the context menu should have some of the functionality of the
toolbars (page navigation, zoom, rotation etc.); likewise, a menu for
the bookmarks (entries), and possibly some buttons too (now I'm
beginning to see the reason for multiple toolbars) would be a nice
complement.

3. The general feel. The red boxes around links look kind of ugly.
Maybe they can only display when the pointer is hovering above them.
There's also the issue of pages not being properly centred if their
sizes are not all the same.

One thing that really bothers me is that when activating fit page or
fit width, the zoom level is set globally in order to fit the biggest
page, so that if you have a document with various page widths you're
stuck with a zoom level adequate only for the biggest one, even in
non-continuous mode.

This should at least be fixed for non-continuous, so the zoom level
would be set according to the current page (or the largest of the 2
current pages). It wouldn't hurt to have some way of deciding which
page is „current” and setting the zoom level accordingly for
continuous mode too, although it might not be as easy.

That was all I could think of. I also intend to contribute a Romanian
translation after these issues have been discussed.

Andi Șerbănescu