Evince for better ebook-reading experience

["András Soltész" <soltesz andras gmail com>]

Dear Evince team,

First, Kudos to you for evince, which is great. I prefer it to Acrobat Reader when reading PDF. My best feature is that it can display the page you were last time reading when you reopen a document.

I recently bought an OLPC XO for ebook reading and that also runs evince (it is called the Read activity in Sugar).

I am currently using a very old Gemstar 1200 device for reading which has some excellent features for  reading. The XO+Evince could replace my REB1200 with some tweak and become a very usable ebook reader program in general.

General suggestions:
- A setting to fit the view to full width but in a way that removes the margins. This way the reader could see the text larger and the unused space (margin) would not be seen. This is very important when you read because during this time you are not after the look of the page, you just want to read the text.  can do it now, but it involves a lot of fiddling.
- Hotkeys for view settings (full width, full page and "full width without margins") would be very welcome
- A setting that would make paging without displaying the same text twice. When this is activated, only full lines would appear on the screen (no half lines at the bottom) and when the user pushes PgDn Evince would show only from the line which was not seen previously. This is very important for continuous reading because with the current PgDn method (overlapping) it is very tiresome to find the line you were reading after you pushed PgDn. If the next view starts with only the yet read line, you don't need to find anything, you can be sure that what you see at the top of the screen is the next line you want to read.


XO / Embedded use specific suggestions:
- Allow to configure navigation actions mapped to specific keyboard keys. This would be very welcome with the XO because when you convert the XO into tablet mode, the navigation buttons placed next to the screen become unusable due to the fact that the orientation changes. Currently, in tablet mode, the button which is normally PgDn becomes the left. With a mapping within Evince, one could correct this and assign the right button to PgDn so you could push the lowest button to go down in the document. Mappings should be linked to screen resolutions in order to make it possible to differentiate between tablet mode and laptop mode screen orientations.
As a lot of linux based machines come to the market and some of them have tablet mode, this could make Evince even more appealing as an instant document viewer and reader solution.
Actually, this would come in handy on my Toshiba tablet as well, because that has only arrow buttons in tablet mode (no PgDn/Up at all).

These features would greatly enhance the reading experience with Evince with ebook content.


Best regards,
Andras