Re: Initial comments

[Ralph Aichinger <ralph mail pangea at>]

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 21:34 +0100, Nikolai Weibull wrote:


> I think that we might as well go with the "browser" metaphor here, where
> there are history buttons, but not necessarily up/down buttons.  What do
> you think?  (I rarely, if ever, use either...),

Well I am a mere user, but to me both paradigms ("paging" like in a book
or in less, as well as "hypertext-browsing" like in the web with
forward, back and history) make sense, but with different types of 
documents. 

For documents with a strong structure and many hyperlinks, the
hypertext-metaphor makes a lot of sense: There is a endnote in
the text, you klick on the endnote to follow it (I wish this
was possible on paper), read it, and press the back button.
Pretty much anything made with pdfTeX and maybe some docbook
generated PDFs are of this type. Academic/technical stuff.

On the other hand in a completely linear text the forward and
back (in history) buttons confuse me. I just want to physically
page through these documents. I don't care where I was before,
I just want to go to the next page in reading order (like in
a novel). Anything without structure, like most advertising,
promotion materials or non-academic/non-technical texts 
is in this category for me.

Even though I know this distinction, I frequently use the 
wrong button in xpdf or Acrobat.

I think it would be cool to have a epiphany-like toolbar
where people could choose what buttons they want with
only one choice made default (I really don't know what
is more common) so it does not confuse people too much.

/ralph