PDF with A4 and A3 - behaviour of horizontal scroll bar

[Nemo]

I have a PDF containing both A4 and A3 documents and I am looking at it with Zoom set to 100%. My computer screen is wider than an A4 sheet but not as wide as an A3 sheet. This means, of course, that when I open this PDF there is a horizontal scroll bar.

The horizontal scroll bar works fine when looking at A3 pages but I have a problem with the scroll bar on A4 pages.

I would query why scroll the bar is displayed at all when I an looking at an A4 sheet on a screen wider than an A4 sheet.

The problem it causes is that it makes scrolling an A4 page on a touchscreen rather fiddly. If you scroll down quickly on a touchscreen your thumb will not being going dead straight down - it will inevitably deviate a few degrees to the right or left and this causes the A4 image to move an inch to the right or left so that an inch at the right or left is off the screen. Of course you can then drag it back into position but that is an annoyance if you have to do it every time you do a fast up or down scroll.

Could we change the horizontal bar so that it only appears when it is needed *for the page you acre actually displaying at the time*?

[Nemo]

Another weird thing I have noticed is that if the display area is narrower than A4 then when you click on a bookmark for an A4 sheet the display area goes blank and if you look at the scroll bar you see it has jumped to the right and the A4 page is "hiding" on the left!

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi, Nemo

The full size horizontal scrollbar is shown because with "continuous" page mode enabled, you are effectively viewing multiple pages at once, including possibly larger page. To circumvent this, enable "single page" mode, instead of the continuous mode, and you should find you are able to view your pages normally without a horizontal scrollbar.

As for the bookmark location jumping you are seeing, this is likely caused by the position the bookmark aims at specifically. Bookmarks usually include a specific coordinate on the page, if that coordinate is set to a section on the right of the page (or even possibly off the edge of the page) we will respect that and try to get that coordinate as close as possible to the top left corner of the display area. You can either customize those bookmarks so that they only point to the page, without making any changes to the position and zoom factor, or you can "forbid" changes to the zoomfactor when clicking bookmarks, which should help to mitigate this issue. That is available from the preferences (Ctrl_K) under "Page display".

Kind regards,

[Nemo]

Hi Daniel

I think I see what you are saying in the first paragraph - if you are in continuous mode you *might* scroll to a larger page so that is why the horizontal bar is there, but my point is that it would be nice if the horizontal bar did not appear *until* you get to the larger page.

I have tried out the same PDF with Adobe Acrobat and, using that, the horizontal scroll bar does not appear until you get to the larger page. Admittedly once the horizontal scroll bar appears it then stays on even when you go back to an A4 page so it is not perfect!

On you second paragraph, the problem seems to have disappeared now but if I comes back I will check your suggestion, thanks.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi, Nemo

Thank you for the feedback, I will report that difference in handling to our dev team so they can consider it. I cannot make any promises of a change at this time.

Kind regards,

[Nemo]

Thinking about this further...

If you have - as most people do - a screen which is not larger than (or not significantly larger than) A4, it makes sense to have all pages display as the same size whether they are A4 or A3 etc.

If pages designed for A3 - like maps or large drawings - appear larger than A4 then when scrolling then either A4 pages will appear in miniature or only part of an A3 page will be displayed. Much better, it seems to me, to have them all display as the same size. If you want to zoom in on part of any page of course you can using finger and thumb.

Of course the actual page properties still need to distinguish different page sizes - e.g. for the purposes of printing, but could we have a "display all pages as same size" option?

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello Nemo,

You have the "Fit Page" zoom level:

image.png (23.63 KiB) Viewed 922 times

Just use that (and single page viewing mode) and you would have the Editor automatically zoom in smaller pages, or zoom out larger ones so that it can fit the entirety of the page in your available screen space.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[Nemo]

That is fine with single page viewing mode but I don't want to use single page viewing mode. I want to be able to scroll from one page to the next.

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello Nemo,

If you display more than one page - having pages that are physically different being zoomed at different zoom levels will more often than not be confusing, rather than helping.
I will bring this up for discussion in a future meeting, though I do not think it will be approved, given that there is a way to achieve this in "single page" viewing mode where the possible confusion is less likely to happen.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[Nemo]

Thanks Stafan.

I think the issue arises principally when scrolling with a touchscreen.

If you select a zoom option of "fit visible" and select the "single page" option you can go from page to page by tapping the "next page" and "previous page" buttons and each page will be displayed fitting the visible area whether it is an A4 page or an A3 page. But if, instead of using the "single page" option, you choose "continuous" so that you can get from page to page by scrolling - as you will probably want to particularly if you are using a touch screen, having pages of different sizes - A4 and A3 - can produce unwelcome results if, as most people will be, you are using a size of screen which means that the view area in your PDF viewer is less than A3 size.

You will want all pages in the PDF to appear the same size on screen. When moving through pages with your thumb, if you are displaying an A4 page at 100% zoom - just fitting the width of the view area - you do not want the following A3 page to be displayed at 100% zoom and so be partly obscured - you want the A3 page to also be fitted within the width of the view area as well. If necessary you can then select a sector of that A3 page to zoom in on (using finger and thumb) but generally you will want to start off with the whole width of the page displayed so that you can select the sector to zoom in on. Similarly you do not want to scroll down with your thumb from an A3 page which fits the width of the view area and find the A4 page following is miniaturised. In other words you will generally want all pages in the PDF to display as if they were the same size - even pages with fine detail which, if printed, you would want printed on A3 or larger paper.

I agree that you can avoid the problem if you do not scroll but if you have a touchscreen it is much easier and more natural to scroll rather than use page forward/back buttons.

[Willy Van Nuffel]

Hi all,

Don't you think that you will create confusion when the "Continuous" view is going to display all the pages at the same size on the users' screen, while in reality these pages are a mix of A4 and A3 ? In "Single Page" view this manner of display is more acceptable.

What you do think about a work-around by resizing all the pages to A4 (or A3) just for viewing on your tablet or touch screen ?
"Resize Pages" goes very fast. Only take care to NOT save the PDF after viewing !

Best regards.

Willy

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Thanks Willy Van Nuffel,

I also believe that the proposed feature would be too confusing for a larger proportion of people than it will help!
And thanks for offering the "Resize Pages"! I should have thought of that as well myself!

Kind regards,
Stefan