GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 787348
TOC-aware search
Last modified: 2018-05-22 17:22:11 UTC
Right now, searching will display the search results like this: foo *asdf* bar 17 lorem *asdf* ipsum 27 in the side bar, and at the same time the TOC will not be visible. I frequently search in long documents (e.g. the 802.11 spec with 3.5k pages), and the page numbers mean nothing to me - I usually am looking for search results within specific chapters (as there may be dozens or hundreds of results overall). Given a document with the structure Section 1 + Chapter 1.1 + Chapter 1.2 Section 2 + Chapter 2.1 + Chapter 2.2 it would be very nice to (optionally?) display the search results embedded into the TOC: Section 1 + Chapter 1.1 foo *asdf* bar 17 Section 2 + Chapter 2.2 lorem *asdf* ipsum 27 Note how the leaf nodes, here "Chapter X.Y" are elided when they contain no results.
Evince can detect when the document has a TOC, and show the results accordingly. I have my doubts regarding the level of granularity to show, because it is common to find documents with sections in the same page. I think, that even showing only the first level in the TOC would be an improvement, although in short-ish documents (e.g. scholar papers) still will be necessary to use some heuristic to determine to which section a text belongs (when those sections are in the same page).
(In reply to Germán Poo-Caamaño from comment #1) > I have my doubts regarding the level of granularity to show, because it is > common to find documents with sections in the same page. Sure, but evince should - in theory at least, since you can jump to a very specific part of the page by using the TOC - know exactly which section a search result belongs to? It only keeps the page->TOC entry mapping now for the reverse display (patch from my brother Benjamin), but that's just an implementation detail? IOW, I'm not really sure what you're saying here.
Or maybe I should say - yes, I think the following _would_ be useful for a search result: Section 1 + Chapter 1.1 foo *asdf* bar 17 + Chapter 1.2 Another *asdf* here 17 + Chapter 1.3 And *asdf* again 17 Section 2 + Chapter 2.2 lorem *asdf* ipsum 27 (note three hits on the same page, in different chapters)
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