Re: Initial comments

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

* Ralph Aichinger (Jan 27, 2005 22:30):
> 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.

Wow, totally agree with this.  A very good summary of how there are two
types of documents that a file viewer such as evince need to deal with.
Perhaps there has to be too modes.  Hard to say how that should be
implemented, though,
	nikolai

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