#228 Improving the bookmarks functionality

[Laszlo Takacs]

Hello,

I am contacting you concerning your excellent piece of software WinDjWiev. I am a great fan of this program and I use it as my DjVu reader by default. As you are still developing it and releasing updates from time to time, I just thought why not to suggest an improvement. What I have in mind is the bookmarks feature. It would be very practical, were there not a serious shortcoming. Here is what I mean: The bookmarks appear in the list on the left in the order you create them. So, when you create a bookmark, it always appears at the bottom of the list. Now, imagine that you have a huge dictionary of some 2000 pages, and in order to facilitate navigation, you create bookmarks for every letter A, B, C…. Z. So far no problem, because you can do it with 30-40 bookmarks, depending on the language. Later on, when you have more time, to further improve your dictionary, you decide to add some more bookmarks for the beginning two letters of the headwords: Ab, Ac, Ad, …Ba, Be, … Za, Ze, Zi, Zo, Zu. Doing this, you and up with 200-300 bookmarks. The problem is that it is very time consuming to position the bookmarks in the right place by moving them up in the list by clicking on “Move up”. Imagine for example that you have already 100 bookmarks and you want to move the last one on the 30th place in the list. It requires 70 mouse-clicks. And so on, for each new bookmark. It is an occupation for a Buddhist monk, modern man hasn’t got that much time. I am sure you are getting my meaning. I think this is the only shortcoming of your otherwise excellent program. More than one solution is imaginable. The simplest would be to allow for bookmarks to be inserted below or above the selected bookmark, just the same as you insert pages for example into a PDF document. Another way to do it would be to allow for bookmarks to be sorted in alphabetical order, or according to their position in the document. And here I suggest to you another improvement in connection with the bookmarks: Collapsible bookmarks. It would be a very useful feature if there are many bookmarks in a document. What I mean is that bookmarks could be added under another bookmark. To continue with the example of a dictionary, it would mean that under the bookmarks for the beginning letters of the headwords A, B, …Z, one could create lower level bookmarks for Ab, Ac, Ad, …. I reckon two levels would suffice even for the thickest volumes.
Well, that’s all I wanted to say. I think these improvements would be welcomed by the users. The fact is that people use djvu files mostly with very voluminous books that in PDF format occupy too much disk space. In these voluminous books bookmarks are essential. It is important that one might be able to create and arrange them easily.

Best regards:
Laszlo Takac

[Mesmeric]

I certainly agree, it is my primary viewer and the bookmarks feature is amazingly useful, but very simplistic. I suffer also from a lack of ability to reorder bookmarks. Specific suggestions -

• Right-click a bookmark and provide 'Add bookmark below' and 'Add bookmark above' choices

• Drag and drop bookmarks to new locations, and/or provide shortcut keys that shift the highlighted one up or down, indents or de-indents (a setting could enable/disable these key operations so it doesn't accidentally happen), and/or provide right-click 'Cut Bookmark' and 'Insert Bookmark' (above/below) options

• Right-click 'Sort Bookmarks A-Z' and 'Sort Bookmarks Z-A'

• Have a simple bookmark manager - ability to highlight a section of bookmarks and move/cut-insert/sort

• Export/Import bookmarks. If the bookmarks were in a suitable exported format we could just open them in a notepad, rearrange them, edit their titles etc, and import them back again (replace existing/add to existing). This would cover users ability to do all the editing they need.

• Clear All Bookmarks option

• A dedicated Bookmarks menu on the top menu strip could provide many of these options
  My recommendation is that Export/Import bookmarks might be the easiest to implement quickly.

• Collapsing folders of bookmarks is ideal but not so priority - spaces can at the moment be used in the titles to give an indentation feel.

• Choice of bookmark icons so you can make some of them stand out

• On entering a bookmark, the Enter key should submit it, not put a new line in the bookmark name

Cheers, David

[kjd]

Just an observation that if you export bookmarks it produces an xml file (admitedly not easy to sort, without an editor such as excel) that can be data reordered into alpha ascending/decending order then re-imported to overwrite the current one.