GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309393
Dual should place even pages at left, and odd pages at right
Last modified: 2006-03-17 18:20:34 UTC
The Dual-mode shows odd pages to the left, and even pages to the right. To resemble a real spread, it should instead place even pages to the left, and odd pages to the right. That would imply that the first page would always be a loner at the top right, which is fine with me though.
Jhonatan what do you think?
From JRB: PDFs can give a hint as to wether the first page is on the left or right. we get that from poppler, but don't use it. From Me: I think we could leave this bug open to track enabling this support, however trying to do this sans PDF hints seems like a bad idea to me.
But without the hints, I think we should place odd (recto, to gratuitously add some jargon) pages to the right. It's the convention normal books use, so why should we default to the opposite? (I was reminded of this bug in my blog reading today: http://blogs.pragprog.com/cgi-bin/pragdave.cgi/Tech/Random/NewPreview.rdoc )
BTW acroread (the 7.0 version) does this also and it is VERY convenient (previewing duplex LaTeX documents). I don't know if it uses some hints from PDF files; seems unlikely as regular pdftex/ps2pdf PDFs are displayed that way, too.
*** Bug 320143 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
How does the printing industry do page numbering? Is the cover or title page traditionally numbered 1 rather than 0? For the documents I'm currently viewing a lot of which don't have a cover page, the current behavior is good. If I'm in dual-page view, I can see the first two body pages as soon as I open the document.
Ubuntu has a bug about this: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/3232
I used to work as a commercial magazine editor. The standard in publishing is that RH pages are odd. You can easily confirm this by looking at a selection of your own books and magazines. Typically, he front cover of a magazine or book is page 1, and pages 2 and 3 are the L and R pages of the first 'double page spread' (DPS). I have seen several PDFs which have been designed as DPS's and the dual mode currently gets it wrong: it shows an RH page of one DPS on the left and the LH page of the next DPS on the right. I agree that this is a bug and the default behaviour should be to display odd pages on the right.
The default should be changed to show even pages at the left and odd pages to the right. The hints the PDF document gives can later be used to change the default. I agree with all the other commenters :)
Should be fixed in recent CVS.
*** Bug 334910 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***