GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 306060
Tabs support
Last modified: 2018-02-06 16:43:45 UTC
I would like to suggest tabs for Evince. I think it is often that when reading a manual there are cross references to other sections of the manual, that one would like to remember to read, and tabs would be perfect for this.
I can see how this could be nice, since we're pretty much the same as a web browser. But I don't think we're going support tabs just for this. Web browsers have a lot of interpage linking, which PDFs don't usually have. So the tabs are probably excessive for remembering to read something. I'm working on an annotation design that might work better for this anyway. You'd simply leave annotation around about references you wanted to read.
*** Bug 314966 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Hello, sorry about the duplicate filing - I missed this bug in my search because it was resolved. Anyhow: I don't think interlinking has anything to do with it - not for browsers, not for document viewers and not for editors or IMs either. Keeping things nice and uncluttered has everything with it to do, on the other hand. :) I often have multiple documents open, just as I have multiple web pages, conversations and source files. Thankfully, people have implemented ways for me to have them in the same instance/window, or things would soon get out of hand. Grouping things on the taskbar just isn't good or effective enough. I feel it's more of a hindrance. Up until today I've been using Acrobat Reader, simply because I didn't know about Evince - and this is the only thing I'm missing that Acrobat gives me. Note that Acrobat don't use tabs, only the possibilty to switch documents via the "Window" menu, at least as far as I know. However, just as I feel that this is a must for me (and I do mean that), I don't want to shove my ways down someone elses throat. I'm fine with not having it being the default, but I would really, really like for this to become an option. If nothing else to copy Acrobats behaviour, where documents can be switched via a menu, the important thing is to keep them inside one instace. If I could toggle tabs on too, I'd be extremely happy. To me, this is a usability issue and there is a reason tabs ar so popular. Nothing to do with interlinking, it has to do with grouping. Well, I feel this is important and hope you guys can think to at least reconsider it. I've been using a "tablike" (Acrobats) system for PDFs for quite a while, and I'm sure I don't want to "downgrade". =) Thanks for your time. Great, great product in all other respects!
It seems this bug should be re-opened for discussion. Kristoffer makes some good points that it would be nice to have addressed. Thanks!
*** Bug 323743 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 326084 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Well, I'm against tabs too because if I want to compare two documents I need to be able to see the both at the same time. But, I agree with you, grouping things on the taskbar just isn't good or effective enough. In fact, it's a problem of the windows manager, not evince. If the way you navigate with your windows manager is inefficient, you should fill a bug for it, not Evince.
I'm not sure that comparison is the operation that would benefit from tabs. I think your use case is skewed. It's not unusual to have 5 or so open documents open at a time in academic research. Tabs provide convenience for handling of these documents. This isn't a corner case. Academia is a significant user of the Linux desktop, particularly in informatics. Firefox is a tabbed document reader, and I would find few that think that the use case for it is a failure or not needed. Both pdf and html are read only formats. It would follow that that both should have a similar viewing experience. I would respectfully suggest that this feature be readdressed.
*** Bug 610167 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I am adding my to vote add this feature. Relying on the window manager to do grouping is not as efficient as tabs.
*** Bug 625355 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I just filed a duplicate bug, so I would like to add my voice to the people clamoring for this. I wanted tabs because I was trying to accomplish something (I forget what) that required me to simultaneously think about two different sections of a user manual. I think this is a fairly general situation. If you are reading a book that bears thinking about, be it a reference manual or a piece of fiction, there will be long range connections that need to be puzzled over. When this happens to me with a physical book, I hold my place, and then start flipping back with my other fingers. What is the PDF viewer equivalent? Tabs is a solution that basically 100% of users would understand with no explanations whatsoever. It is possible that some sort of annotation system could work here, but it would feel very clunky. I would basically have to annotate "got here" where i stopped, and then start scrolling up. This would make me feel like I was losing my place, even though I wasn't. If I forgot to erase the "got here" annotation, the next time I wanted to flip back, I would have two "got here"'s to go back to, and that would be even more confusing. And then, what if I get confused again, and just want to flip back and forth between pages 100 and 200 while I think about how they relate to each other? I could annotate page 100 with "confusing bit", but this is all much less intuitive than simple tabbed browsing. This could all be done with separate windows, but that adds clutter to the taskbar and makes it fairly likely that I will flip to other applications during my confused flipping between pages 100 and 200, breaking up my thinking even more. Sébastien labeled this a problem with the window manager, but I think this view is mistaken. The window manager is a generic tool that interfaces with thousands of programs. Also, there are at least ten decent window managers. How will all ten know to treat evince specially if evince does not ask to be treated specially? Tabbed browsing is a request to be treated as a single unit that will be respected by any correctly functioning window manager. Sébastien said that we should not have tabs because it doesn't help compare documents. This is fair, and side-by-side viewing for comparison would be another great feature, but as I explained above, there are many use cases where I want to jump back and forth between two documents, or two different pages of the same document, but I am not trying to see if they are slight variations on the same thing. In the case when I simply need to think about both documents simultaneously, I would prefer the greater screen real estate afforded by tabbed browsing, rather than a side-by-side view that would be more useful for comparison. Anyway, evince is a great piece of software and this is a small feature request. Thanks to everyone involved with the project, whichever way you decide to go with this!
I would also like to voice my support for some kind of tabbed viewing experience in Evince. Like others have said, in the academic world, having many many pdf documents open is a reality. There are just so many different sources to compare and it really would be a benefit to have the documents sorted in some kind of side pane window (preferred) or tabbed bar. Despite not having tabs, I think Evince is the best reader available in gnome, so it would be made perfect to have this option. Many applications are using tabs and this feature isn't foreign to gnome. For example, nautilus received tabs recently. An extension of this feature into a pdf reader could be the next logical step. Addressing the window manger question: Why can't we have both options? For example, dragging a tab outside of the reader could have it open in a new window for the window manager to take over. This allows the best of both worlds without discontinuity in the desktop experience. This is default behavior in firefox. Keep up the great work! I appreciate it!
*** Bug 632388 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Yet another person filing a duplicate bug because I would really like this feature. So far, there have been a lot of comments with lots of support for adding a tab feature. I will try not to repeat all of the reasons others would like tabs. There have been only two comments against a tab feature. The first one is about interlinking. While PDFs don't have this like webpages do, it is common to have related PDFs open. A sequence, for example. In a web browser you would open them as tabs, you should be able to do the same in Evince. The second comment against tabs is comparing two documents. Adding tab support would not affect your ability to do this. You should still be able to open documents in their own window just as in every other tabbed application. You can compare your documents side by side, and we can have our groups of documents in tabs. Other PDF viewers have tabs. It's not totally unheard of or out of place here.
I just noticed that this bug is 5 years old !
*** Bug 637295 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Tabs are very usefull if you have many PDFs reports and want to find a string on them. You just fill a search and go through the tabs doing the search. If you have one report on each window you have to re-type the search string for each document.
*** Bug 656090 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 661895 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Oh my god! Just make it optional. 5 years of pain!
Hi guys, For myself, I can't make use of Evince until it has a tabbed window view. In my work, I have to read and refer to tons of papers, documents, specifications in parallel, and if each one were open in an individual window, it'd mess up my techniques for managing my desktop and be unworkable. For now, I use Acroread. In fact, a while back (2 years?), the Acroread folks tried to make the Linux acroread version not have a tabbed view (as it apparently is on Windows now) and there was a revolt -- I rolled back to Acroread v7 and sat pat until they fixed this. This was all documented on the adobe forums IIRC. Anyway, they did fix it. but I'd like to move off of using acroread if I could and use something open source, but can't/won't until it supports my needs. these needs are: tabbed view (MUST) "recent files" scrollable menu with unlimited # of entries (user-settable limit) (SHOULD, but almost a MUST) acroread limits it to 50, which is too few for me. multi-entry selection in "recent files" menu to enable batch file opening (SHOULD) de- and re-attachable tabs a la Chrome & Firefox browsers (SHOULD) View splitting -- i.e. being able to multiply horizontally split (individually scrollable) the view on a document in order to poke thru different portions simultaneously (it boggles me to this day that this feature isn't more widely available across all apps on today's systems) (SHOULD) (actually, I'm somewhat puzzled/dismayed that the underlying windowing system doesns't automatically provide for tabs and split view and such for all apps... sigh) I note that status on this bug is "resolved wontfix" -- but i really hope it can be changed such that we can at least get simple tabs thanks, =JeffH
*** Bug 676353 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I agree. The tabbed feature would be good, but the ability to open up two pdfs as separate windows should still be available. I am currently using evince because everytime I compile a latex document it automatically detects the changes in the tex file and updates the pdf. But its annoying when I am working on too many latex documents and there are a bunch of pdfs open. Overall, the user should be able to choose what he prefers as a default, either new documents opening up as tabs or as new windows.
I agree too. Tabbed feature is good.
Please compare with GEdit (gedit). An excellent Gnome UI with capabilities for tabs and separate windows. True, it CAN be used for read-write, but it can ALSO be used for read-ONLY, so please do not disqualify this comparison. There is no justification for a WONTFIX!
See also gnome-terminal, another Gnome UI with tabs and windows. Also, proprietary Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux (acroread) has tabs. Do we really want free software users defecting to proprietary software to get a simple feature that could be easily offered by evince? Please reconsider "RESOLVED WONTFIX". A search engine search (pick your fave) for "evince tabs" shows the fervent community desire for this feature. So much for democracy? Alternate suggestions like using a web browser with a PDF plugin for tabbed PDF viewing are far worse than native evince tab support. If the evince maintainers want to make a point by their refusal, it might be worth considering a fork that could easily incorporate future mainline evince developments.
Seeing as there has been only one comment against having tabs, and 0 comments against having them from this decade, I think a developer or designer should comment on why they have determined that window management supersedes tabs for the use cases of evince.
Suppot providing tabs, users can have the right to decide whether enable or disable it.
Support providing tabs, users can have the right to decide whether enable or disable it.
This is not going to happen. In addition to the simplicity of the user interface, having only one document open per process has strong stability and security advantages.
(In reply to comment #31) > This is not going to happen. > > In addition to the simplicity of the user interface, having only one document > open per process has strong stability and security advantages. I know, thank you for your response.
(In reply to comment #31) > This is not going to happen. > > In addition to the simplicity of the user interface, having only one document > open per process has strong stability and security advantages. I like to enact as a smartass here (I know this is always easy as an outsider)... I don't think stability and security issues are legit reasons for not implementing the tab feature (which would be really handy for average users like me)! I think so because google already solved the stability drawback of tabs with a multi-process architecture for its web browser chromium/chrome (http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/multi-process-architecture). Mozilla's working on the same for firefox which recently got enabled in the nightly builds (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). In the long run a similar multi-process architecture could be implemented for evince – which probably would be less complex due to the nature of a document viewer compared to a web browser (my personal assumption). In the short run "only" a single-process tab feature (which could be disabled by default if you like) should be added to evince to satisfy the great demand for it. Additionally I'd like to add that gnome's design goal of "simplicity" shouldn't be always first priority because (at least in this case) there's nothing like "objective simplicity" – it always depends on the use case what's simpler and what's more complex! If multiple PDF documents are opened (as I guess is often the case with most of the average gnome users who read stuff digitally (students, scholars, etc.)) it is way more simple to stay on top of things having tabs! Try web browsing without tabs – it's a horrible experience even if you're doing only a tiny little research! Moreover a good implementation of tabs would only become visible in the interface _if_ actually more than one PDF is opened at the same time! Further I'd like to point out that tabs would allow the introduction of powerful new multi-document features like the afore-mentioned search operation over multiple PDFs (a feature that would be pretty useful for many (academic) people including myself)! I strongly hope you revise your verdict ("This is not going to happen") in consideration of my argumentation! Thanks you.
*** Bug 729412 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'm also in support of tabbed browsing. Add tabbed browsing feature in Evince.
I am in support of tabbed browsing out of acroread experience. An early comment claimed that the windows manager should be in charge of tabs. xterm has nice tabs and I use them a lot. Are those provided by the window manager? If that is the case, why can't evince exploit the same capability. If that is not the case, here's another reason to advocate for tabs. I am aware that there are other developments under way (btw, very grateful for all these efforts that help me avoiding acroread and its poor linux performace!). Tabs may still be not the most voted issue. I vote for them if I may, to tip the balance. Cheers Roberto
Agreed, this would be nice, and make Evince consistent with all the other GNOME applications (Gedit, Epiphany, Terminal, etc) that do offer tabs. Stability is not really an argument when (A) one can use process-per-tab architecure as mentioned if they're that bothered and (B) Epiphany obviously offers tabs, and I think a web page is a far greater threat to stability than a PDF or other document, and yet GNOME are happy to allow tabs for web pages... At a certain point in time, whoever is then in charge of Evince will realise that all users looking at GNOME for the first time expect this feature to exist, and that it'll make the platform far more intuitive, consistent, and usable to them if it does.