GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 165413
visual feedback when opening complex documents
Last modified: 2005-06-17 15:15:21 UTC
When opening any PDF document, there is a visible delay during which the application does not redraw itself properly. This delay is especially noticeable with complex documents like the one in bug #158059. A visual feedback of some sort would be nice, like a "please wait" dialog or something smarter, just to let the user know that evince is doing something and is not hopelessly crashed.
I have been wondering what we should do here. I would really like the first page to come into view as quickly as possible on a multipage document and to lazy load the rest of the pages. However on a single page document it would be nice to have some kind of progress meter or feedback showing that something is happening.
Maybe follow the trend introduced by the recent password-protected widget (see : http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/cvsquery.cgi?branch=&dir=evince&who=jrb&date=explicit&mindate=2005-01-25%2015:53&maxdate=2005-01-25%2015:55 ) and just show a nice page with a huge hourglass and "opening document, please wait" or something like that. Combined with a hourglass mouse cursor, it should be enough to help the user understand what is going on.
I guess I'll have to ping JRB to ask if that could be used for other things. He had asked if we needed any other intermediate windows like the security one during it's development and I think I said no.
If you want to be fancy or osx-like, you could even show an animated hourglass, but maybe that would be overkill. And it would slow down the document opening even more :|
Bryan why this was marked Low priority?
This is not visible anymore in "regular" PDFs, but still an issue in very complex documents like the one here : http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2004/11/11/lemon_jelly.pdf The adobe reader 7 solves this issue by refreshing the display at short intervals (so you see the PDF draw itself in front of you, it's not the best thing ever but better than nothing).
Marco: I think I put this low since I wasn't sure about the ideas we discussed in the bug. The problem is real, however I'm not sure that creating a progress cover screen is the ideal solution. Maybe it is a good idea, but since it seems a little complicated I didn't want anyone to charge off writing it and then we decide there's a better way later.
*** Bug 300265 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Another usecase - opening dvi document causes very long delay due to font generation. Definitely, there should be some sort of feedback.
Created attachment 47144 [details] [review] Patch
Created attachment 47325 [details] [review] tar.gz with patch and new sources
Created attachment 47330 [details] [review] tar.gz with patch and new sources Fixed build error
Created attachment 47407 [details] [review] Updated to recent state of CVS
I think this was checked in
Well maybe, but the bug does not seem fixed : I tried opening the PDF from bug 158059 : http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2004/11/11/lemon_jelly.pdf in evince CVS, and there is no feedback. A blank page appears, and nothing much else seems to be happening.
Hrm, nothing in the sidebar?
I usually have it closed :-) I tried to leave the sidebar opened, and then I opened that last PDF. The sidebar just closed (I guess because it's a 1-page document ?)
There should be progress pulsing in statusbar. I believe, you get this closed too :) Probably, we need to indicate it in main window instead
Nope, the statusbar is opened, and there's nothing pulsating there...
And there is no text at all, something like "Loading document. Please wait"?
I'll try to explain things better : when I open the evince window, I see "Loading document. Please wait" appear very briefly in the status bar. Then, it disappears, and a blank document appears in the main view. Then you have to wait quite a long time (>30 seconds on my machine) before anything shows up. That's the delay I'm talking about, there is no feedback during this rendering phase. There is nothing to tell the user that evince is actually doing something, it looks like the PDF is empty.
Well, I think this should be in another bug. It should should be named: "Visual Feedback while rendering pages". That's a bit different task, since we show white rectangle for every new page and user can be confused that this page is blank. Probably we should just display message in statusbar.
Well I'm ok with putting it in another bug, even if IMHO "opening" a document covers the reading and rendering. The distinction between these two steps is due to the implementation, they are not distinct to the user (they were not for me anyway). This bug was initially more about document rendering than document loading (cf the pdf test cases). But I'd understand if you'd like to see this bug closed :-) I opened bug #308082 for this issue.