GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 320943
In PDF, evince should display index in sidebar when it is available
Last modified: 2009-08-15 18:40:50 UTC
Evince defaults to displaying thumbnails in the sidebar even when an Index is provided in the file. It should display the index in the sidebar by default when there is one. Other information:
Hm, do you have any argumentation for this? Really thumnails and index are equivalent. If you are just talking of letting user choose between them, it's just a duplicate of another bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 316962 ***
It might be difficult to see that one can switch between thumbnails and index views. Personally, I never saw that I could before somebody said "oh evince doesn't handle the index as xpdf does" and I investigated the issue. Using a sensible default would be better than letting the user configure the view (bug:316962). And easier too. Or, both could be made (sensible default + configurable). I'd prefer this bug to stay open if you don't mind. Could you reopen ?
Then explain why index is sensible default please.
Well, this is difficult, since it depends on taste, on the way people use evince, etc. - For most (text-oriented) documents, using an index to navigate in the document is easier than using thumbnails, where the text is too small to be readable anyway. - Text documents' structure (the index) is often more important than their layout - Acrobat reader uses Index by default (well, I know this argument sucks) If one had a way to determine whether a document is a "text document" or a "graphical document", one could choose between index and thumbnails based on this. but currently, I think most PDF documents are text documents. And even Beamer presentations are easier to browse with the Index.
Bryan, what do you think?
Btw, Lucas, sorry but it seems this is already implemented: 2005-09-19 Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpg@redhat.com> * shell/ev-window.c: (update_sidebar_visibility), (setup_sidebar_from_metadata), (ev_window_setup_document), (setup_view_from_metadata): Show the index by default when there is one
Ah, that's cool :-) I didn't check the CVS version, only the version in Ubuntu Breezy.