Hi,

first I have to say noone from Okular ask for an rework of the standard settings.

this is how okular look like after an fresh installation


and an mockup of the toolbar with my recommandation


the differences:
- sidebar it is nice to have an sidebar to have an overview but most of the time you don't need it. I'm thinking more on a sidebar like kate where you can click and than the sidebar will open
- for the standard icons I choose:
- print (was missing) don't know why most of the time I want to see the pdf or print but print is one of the main function for a pdf viewer
- presentation would be nice next to print cause you want to read or print an pdf
- I move the setting from the page bar (bottom) to the icon bar, cause when you show the page bar the space was left with information that has space in the toolbar.
- the zoom block with zoom in and out than the drop down and than fit width fit page
- navigation block with browse zoom and select and review tool
- search icon
I remove most of the time the text description of the icons only for the special icons the text was alongside cause for standard icons the user don't need an description eo. dolphin.

- from dolphin I added the control icon (burger icon) on the right side. It isn't the show hide menu bar it is the same than in Dolphin when you click on it you get the menu bar as drop down menu so you have the same functionality as an above menu bar. when you only have the show menu bar it is boring cause you have to click and get it but with dropdown functionality you can remove the menu bar without losing the functionality.

what do you think?

Yes, Okular indeed needs some rework. Good ideas - covers most of the needed functionality.

I would change also:

• The default selection tool should be text selection in my opinion - I rarely used the "rectangle" selection, instead fiddling with the drop down menu
• Related: Strg+1, Strg+2, Strg+3 ... uuh It took some time remembering these shortcuts. The shortcuts should relate to their function somehow.
• I know. "Save as ..." because technical stuff, etc. - This program needs a real "Save" function eg if you reviewed a paper and just save it
• As you already said - the sidebar should be accessible like in Kate. Many people need the TOC
• Also related to the TOC: Okular only shows in which section/subsection/... you currently are. Click on a section with subsections and scroll down - you'll see that the "marker" disappears if you reach a subsection. You'll get lost in the document.

For me, the most important issue is the sidebar. It looks distracting and wastes a lot of space (way too much for the functionality it offers.)
Especially for an application like okular, where you would want to maximize the screen estate, this is an issue.
Apart from that, the sidebar is visually sunken and thus looks isolated from the rest of the ui, something we concluded to be bad, in an earlier sidebar discussion about sidebars.

Hello,

I started from andreas_k's work. Icon-only buttons don't work well when there are too many, or when the icon isn't well known, so the first thing I did was adding text to Presentation and the two rightmost zoom buttons. Then, the window width was well over 1024px, which is the smallest screen the HIG says we should support. Item removal needed. Thus:

• Removed the two "Fit" zoom buttons. This functionality is easily accessible from the zoom level dropdown.
• Removed the Zoom tool. I don't use it (yes this is arbitrary), and there are already three zoom-related buttons in the toolbar. That doesn't mean the feature is removed, of course.
• Removed the four page navigation inputs. They work visually below the document; the current page information belongs to a status bar; page numbers in books are at the top/bottom of pages.
• Moved the Find button to the beginning. This removes a separator and thus the design doesn't violate the HIG. I think the classification is better this way, too : actions, zoom, tools.
• Kept Print, Zoom in/out, Find and the three remaining tools as frequently used features.
• Kept Presentation as a feature not many users know and I want to advertise.

This process led me to the following layout (click for full resolution):


Random thoughts:

• The Review mode should be redesigned.
• We need guidelines for zoom !
• Okular's menu bar is quite complex. I'm worried how to put everything into a single menu.
• What happens when no document is open ?
• At least one icon is used wrongly (for the text selection tool).
• transform-mode fits Browse perfectly, but will need a new name. Currently, input-mouse is used.

Louis

much better than my suggestion Louis. also your link to the HIG. thanks a lot. I am really happy that you link to our guidelines.

I am a big fan of moving the page information into the toolbar cause
1. you have the next and previous page icons there (one main feature I miss in your mockup)
2. the look and feel is quite simular to the zoom (icon, text, icon)
3. when the user hide the status bar there is no information about where you are and how much pages have all together
4. our HIG say as less bars as possible and an additional status bar for two numbers is for me to less information for the standard setting. the user can show the status bar via menu button

my suggestion
action, page navigation, zoom, tools
or
page navigation, zoom, tools, actions cause I don't know if it is good to have search left but I like your grouping

sidebar is well done and I know the wrong icon usage but yes it should be fixed with this changed.

PDF document is still on sharp increase owing to its format consistency and portability. To this extent, Okular is destined to get improvement on whatever its core function or visual apperance.

Personally, I've been a kind of crazy PDF program tester for around 10 years. Throughout this period, I got access to PDF programs, from the tiny Pdftk, Mupdf to Foxit, Nitro and of course, Adobe one.

As for impression of Okular, I would like to point out that the Bookmark functionality is expected to be enhanced, by saying which I wish to direct your attention to PDF-XChange (On Win platform), which has mature bookmark management system (including sub-levels, etc). I also believe Okular can learn much from this software (which has shortcomings though, such as delayed loading in opening large files).

PS: I am not going to send adevertisement, but all from my personal experience judgement, I hand in aforementioned opinion. Thanks.

BTW: I am a Kaos and BSD user and I love open source community.

please something like bookmark and other APP bugs report as an bug.

I only like to discuss the standard layout when you use Okular the first time. that you can change hopefully everything for your special needs should be clear for KDE Software.

When you think about labels on buttons, please be aware that this is not for the application to decide. There is a global option in the widget theme settings, so if a user chooses to show text next to or below icons in toolbars, every KDE application has to respect that. Therefore all toolbars have to work with labels.

really, dolphin only show some icons with labels not all.