tmbdev@gmail.com: Fwd: PDFedit

[Michal H. <ms...@gm...>]

Hi.
Here is the forwarded message from Thomas, I have received via private
email.
He suggests some improvements in user interface and some of them are
worth thinking about. Some of them are already tracked as feature
requests but others are not. 
I think that we should talk about them and file those which seem
reasonable to us.

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Thomas Breuel <tm...@gm...>
> Date: Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:10 PM
> Subject: PDFedit
> To: pdf...@li...
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
>  I'm trying to use PDFedit to leave comments on student papers and
>  theses.  I'm using the Ubuntu version.
> 
>  It seems to have the right functionality and it looks like a lot of
>  work has gone into it.  There are some uses cases for which all the
>  complex functionality the user interface exposes is useful.  However,
>  I think my usage (simple text and graphical annotations) is also an
>  important use case (probably the more common one), and I think it
>  would be good if the UI could reflect that.
> 
>  * The default user interface setup leaves very little room for
>  actually viewing and annotating the PDF, and it exposes a lot of
>  options that are probably meaningless or not useful to many users.
>  Furthermore, if I change the UI to hide stuff, that isn't remembered
>  across invocations.  Some GUI customizations can be made persistently
>  through preferences, but not all.  I'd suggest starting up with a
>  simple page view and also simplifying the default set of toolbars.
>  Consoles, tree views, etc. could be turned on/off with toolbars.  It might
>  useful for the application to remember its UI state across invocations.
> 
>  * The usual PDF navigation keyboard shortcuts (space, backspace,
>  arrows, page down/up) don't work; instead, moving through the pages is
>  mapped to Control-PgDown and Control-PgUp.  Why are such frequently
>  used operations mapped to such an inconvenient key sequence?  I'd
>  suggest making PageDown, PageUp, space, and backspace all work for
>  navigation.
> 
>  * The menus don't conform to standard Gnome or KDE desktop
>  conventions.  I'd recommend making them conform.
> 
>  * There doesn't seem to be any Undo functionality, either in the menus
>  or using the standard keyboard shortcuts.  I'd recommend adding Undo
>  and Redo.
> 
>  * The selection tools don't seem to be doing what I would expect them
>  to do; the only tool that works for me is the text selection tool.
>  The "Select All", "Select Annotations", and "Select Graphical Objects"
>  don't select anything reliably for me.  I don't know what the cause is;
>  maybe I don't understand what they are supposed to do, or maybe
>  they just don't work on some PDFs.  Either way, more feedback from
>  the application about what those tools are supposed to do and indication
>  of failures would be good.
> 
>  * More generally, there often is no visual feedback for
>  when the system is working (busy cursor) or whether something failed
>  (beep, flash, ...), so it's hard to tell whether some operation just
>  isn't doing anything or whether it's taking a long time.
> 
>  Anyway, thanks again for making this software available.  It certainly
>  is useful already.  I hope that you can improve the support for the
>  simple annotation use case.
> 
>  Tom

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Michal Hocko