GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 580954
Index autoexpansion makes index cluttered and unusable after prolonged reading.
Last modified: 2018-05-22 13:30:33 UTC
When scrolling through a document, the sidebar index' categories expand automatically when a page corresponding to an index category is reached. When browsing a thoroughly-bookmarked PDF, so many categories expand, that the index becomes very long and cluttered, decreasing the index' usefulness and defeating the purpose of a hierarchical index. After prolonged browsing, the index is fully expanded; in a well-bookmarked PDF, this requires frequently scrolling and visually scanning the index in order to find a shortcut that would be easy to find otherwise. My suggestion is to expand an index category only when the little triangle button beside the category is clicked. For what it's worth, this is also Acrobat's default behaviour. Other information:
My suggestion is to collapse the item if it was expanded automatically.
Yes, that does work. The issue is, in a PDF that has many nested bookmarks, this requires constant collapsing. The PDFs I tend to read are roleplaying game PDFs. These typically have many categories and subcategories, and it is not unusual for some chapters to have a subcategory every couple of pages. This system works very well for looking up rules, but when simply reading the PDF, the automatic expansion makes the index unusable, and to manually collapse all the entries is inconvenient. It's not that it can't be done, it's just unpleasant. I suspect the same situation is also present in technical manuals, but I could be wrong. Hope you're enjoying your day, Ryder
Does this report is still active?
Confirming. I guess a solution would to auto-hide auto-expanded items, or to add an option to not auto-expand. Will try to cook a patch of the first.
As an alternative to changing the auto-expansion behavior (which I do find useful) we could implement a keyboard shortcut that collapses everything. I've proposed this in bug 775039. Then once you think the outline is too cluttered you could press that.
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