Re: Location of the down button

[Nikolai Weibull <mailing-lists evince rawuncut elitemail org>]

* Jeff Muizelaar (Feb 05, 2005 23:20):
> Well reading some pdfs today, I found the location of the down button
> rather irritating. Usually, when you most often want to go to the next
> page your eyes (and for me, my cursor) are at the bottom of the page,
> and it is awkward to have to move them to the upper left corner to
> find the back button. I often found myself wanting to click the next
> button on the find bar instead of the down button. The amount of
> eye/cursor travel also gets worse when you have the sidebar enabled,
> and you have to move from the bottom right to the top left and then to
> the start of the page.

> I am not really sure what the best way to fix this would be.
> Continuous scroll eliminates the problem easily, but doesn't help for
> single page view. Xpdf solves it by having the scroll bar switch pages
> when it gets to the top or the bottom. This works better, but is not
> really intuitive scroll bar behavior. Small up/down buttons at the
> bottom would help, but might look ugly or just plain wrong.

> Any other ideas or comments?

Well, first of all, most other viewers tend to have the up/down buttons
in the toolbar.  The difference is that they tend to be in the middle,
not the far left.  They also tend to be in the reverse order of how
evince does it (gpdf, ggv, Preview, ...).

I find that keyboard navigation is much simpler and better than relying
on buttons on a toolbar.  It's sad that space and backspace aren't bound
yet, as they are in most other viewers.  (Another nice addition would be
Vi keyboard bindings, *hint* *hint*.)

Another thing tangentially related to this: could we not have a toggle
or something for how the mouse operates?  ggv and gpdf use the mouse to
scroll/drag the page display around, so that one doesn't have to rely on
hard-to-hit scrollbars, instead of having the mouse do (mostly rather
pointless) selections,
	nikolai

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