GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 771627
Text highlighting is not accurate and not practical
Last modified: 2017-09-26 18:13:29 UTC
For a basic text highlighting task; 1. User must first click on the "Annotate the document" icon on the top bar. Then a new bar appears below the top bar, which only has two small icons on its left side. This new bar is a waste of valuable screen space, those two icons could be placed on the top bar which has lots of empty space. 2. User must click on the icon which has "Add highlight annotation" tooltip (by the way that icon does not represent a marker or anything resembling highlighting, you can only tell by its tooltip). 3. Then cursor becomes a plus sign. Then user should click on the beginning of the text, hold clicking and drag until the end of the text. However this "dragging" is not accurate. It begins from an early point of the text and ends not exactly where dragging stopped. Removing the highlight requires a wider text selection, then in the right click menu "Remove annotation" appears, which is good. However, "Add annotation" does not appear in the right click menu when a text selected, which is impractical and not in coherence with "Remove annotation" style. IMHO, text highlighting should be regarded as the most basic and important part of PDF highlighting. Therefore it should be designed more user friendly and accurate. Suggestion: Text highlight function should be associated with text selection, instead of dragging a fictional rectangle on the document. This would provide accuracy. Suggested model: User selects text first, then clicks on "highlight" option in right click menu, or clicks on a highlight marker icon on the top bar, for example. Simple and effective.
Please, use one file bug report per issue. (In reply to Thomas Anderson from comment #0) > For a basic text highlighting task; > > 1. User must first click on the "Annotate the document" icon on the top bar. > > Then a new bar appears below the top bar, which only has two small icons on > its left side. This new bar is a waste of valuable screen space, those two > icons could be placed on the top bar which has lots of empty space. This was already reported in Bug 771300 In summary in won't be fixed because: * we will add more annotations in the future * The headerbar is already too cluttered which does not allow to snap evince to the left or right in some common resolutions. See Bug 732289 > 2. User must click on the icon which has "Add highlight annotation" tooltip > (by the way that icon does not represent a marker or anything resembling > highlighting, you can only tell by its tooltip). We need better icons. > 3. Then cursor becomes a plus sign. Then user should click on the beginning > of the text, hold clicking and drag until the end of the text. > > However this "dragging" is not accurate. It begins from an early point of > the text and ends not exactly where dragging stopped. If you mean that the highlight appears in a different position than the actual text, then it is a bug in poppler-glib. I don't remember the bug number at this moment. > Removing the highlight requires a wider text selection, then in the right > click menu "Remove annotation" appears, which is good. However, "Add > annotation" does not appear in the right click menu when a text selected, > which is impractical and not in coherence with "Remove annotation" style. > > IMHO, text highlighting should be regarded as the most basic and important > part of PDF highlighting. Therefore it should be designed more user friendly > and accurate. > Suggestion: > > Text highlight function should be associated with text selection, instead of > dragging a fictional rectangle on the document. This would provide accuracy. It can be both.
*** Bug 770220 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to Germán Poo-Caamaño from comment #1) > In summary in won't be fixed because: > * we will add more annotations in the future It would be very convenient if the user could add their own buttons. For example, I often use a squiggly red underline annotation, but at present I have to use a default yellow highlight annotation and then changes its properties each time.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 772620 ***