9

Idea:

Currently, okular seems to offer no dedicated way to
- view different chapters / sections / etc. of the same document side by side
(e.g. reference section next to main document, etc. )
- view different documents side by side (for example to aid in the correction of documents, to visualise the progress of a document, to compare results or electronic devices by comparing plots or their datasheets side by side, etc. ), so that users in need of such mechanisms either have to rely on external means (e.g. tiling suport in window managers like recently kwin, awkwardly rearrange window sizes and positions to achieve a side by side setup, etc.) or have to have the same document open in multiple windows. Since the concept of multiple (detachable) views is already used by many KDE4 applications (among them konsole, dolphin, konqueror, etc.), I would like to propose the addition of such a feature in okular.

Considering the amount of work relative to how often I think this would be used, I think just using two windows would be better. For dolphin, for instance, moving files between two folders is extremely common. But I just don't see it being common enough for okular to justify it. Especially considering you would need to duplicate not just the main document, but the sidebar as well.

@TheBlackCat

Good point regarding the side bar for the case of different documents, since I do not use the side panel that much (beyond the table of contents), I had not thought about this.

But the use case of having multiple views for the same document could be handled similar to the way dolphin deals with split window (e.g. places, information et al. stay the and change only depending on the selected panel of the view).

You can open the PDF as a KPart in Konqueror and split the view - I think that would do exactly what you want.

@TheBlackCat

For me at work it's very usual to be working on multiple documents at the same time that are related, and then you must be switching between them again and again. Solutions?
- Open two (or more) windows. Then you have 2 tasks on your task bar representing "the same": your docs. It's an easy trick, but not the expected for me, it requires extra "job/time" to detect who is who.
- Use konqueror split view system and embed the doc on each view. Second trick, now you need to have a "third party" app. What if you don't use konqueror?
- Split views. Now you have just one (related to our two documents) entry for docs in the taskbar, easier to find. Here the previous comment of setecastronomy makes sense. Even more, you can have a "highlight system" similar to the one used in dolphin, that is, active view is colored as usual, while other views have a darker background, so it makes far easier to detect which of them is now active (assuming you split multiple times). Then all buttons do act over the document of current active view. Of course you may have multiple left panels (bookmarks, thumbnails), but i don't think that's a problem.

Regards