8

Idea:

While Okular is great, working with a large number of documents (like having a lot of referenced papers opened while writing my thesis) is akin to browsing the web with Netscape Navigator 4.x back in the late 90's: zillions of open windows, unable to open a hyper-link "in the background" even though okular is capable of handling the content behind the link, etc. . Therefore, I would like to propose the addition of (multiple) tabs per open Okular window. Given that applications like dolphin provide a tab implementation which doesn't interfere with a more traditional, SDI based workflow while providing operations like moving/rearranging tabs, etc., it should be possible to add this feature without introducing additional clutter to the (default) layout of the application.

Use cases:

- easier grouping / spatial organisation of related documents within one okular window
- open hyperlinks "in the background" / whithout interrupting the flow of information while reading a document
- Allow to quickly switch to supplementary information while giving presentations

Why can't you just use the okular kpart in konqueror?

TheBlackCat: That would add all of Konqueror's features and it would be slower. Additional there would be some short cut problems.
And there aren't a lot of people who think of that, I think, so it would be easier for newbies to go along with Okular with tab support.

@TheBlackCat

Yes, Konqueror and the okular kpart is an option to overcome this problem without adding MDI support directly to okular. But then again, why do we "need" tabs in konsole (you can have multiple instances of konsole running as kparts in konqueror just fine as well), why are there multiple tabs in dolphin (esp. since the dolphin plugin *is* what is used for konqueror, so telling people who want to use multi-tab dolphin to settle for konqueror instead would not be that unreasonable), etc. . Maybe it's my fault, but having a strict SDI for okular while having lots of other applications with MDI / tab support strikes me as a kind of an inconsistency.

Secondly, there are precedences for MDI aware document viewers out there, so other users coming from applications like - for example - Adobe's Acrobat Reader may find it a bit inconvient to have one open window per document / view.

Thirdly, it may be that my use case of okular is odd, because I tend to run it as an information/document browser rather than an information/document viewer (10+ open documents a time, information within documents tends to spawn additional instances), although okular lacks some convenience features for such a "browser" (tabs, back-and-forward button for hyperlinked documents, to a lesser extend views).

If the number of users interested in a MDI capable okular is to small to warrant an inclusion of features like tabs, then I will happily try to work with konqueror and the okular kpart.

Depending on the situation even split view support could be interesting. It's very usual to be reading somehow related documents, and you need to be switching between them, so having a horizontal/vertical split would be faaar more interesting.

+1 For tabs + horizontal/vertical split

any moderator: please remove this post, the next post talks exactly about this.

You can also tab whole windows starting in KDE 4.4.

That would be a possibility but I don't know exactly how it can be used.
But isn't application supported tabbing nicer?

I knew I recognized this idea...maybe because I suggested one previously...

brainstorm.php#idea40137

@Kryten2X4B:

I somehow managed to overlook your brainstorm entry, sorry for duplicating your efforts. For what it's worth, I also voted for your wishlist item on bko, but given the resistance of some of the maintainers, I'm not expecting much from it. Perhaps I can cobble together a proof of concept patch once my thesis is finished, but this may also take some time.

@TheBlackCat:

Yes, I'm aware of this development and it would be in principle a solution to my request. There are, however, in my opinion stll some arguments in favour of a tabbing interface for an application like okular:

- Consistency: at the risk of repeating myself, but there is a load of other kde4 applications that have an MDI / Tab interface on their own, some of them for (arguably) less convincing reasons and some of them even though you can use the corresponding kparts in konqueror just fine. Will these tabbing capabilities be removed once window tabbing goes mainstream and/or a "tabbing only for those who need it and have no kpart which can be used inside konqui" policy is formulated and enforced? Somehow, I don't think that this will be the case.

- Familiarity / Discoverability : Some users coming from applications like Acrobat Reader expect a kind of MDI/Tabbing interface for a document browser because it was part of their established workflow. Furthermore, while I definitly will use the window - tabbing option a lot starting with KDE 4.4., I'm a bit sceptical about the discoverability of this approach for novice users.

- Availability: At work, I sometimes have to use Microsoft Windows and it would be nice to maintain my workflow
regardless of the operating system. While konqueror should work with KDE on windows, I'm not aware of plans to
port KWin to such a platform. Users of okular under Mac OS X may (and certainly will) have a different opinion about the benefits of an MDI interface.

- Additional features possible: Introducing the concept of having multiple documents per okular window open allows for session support, which I would find tremendously helpful, because I happen to reopen the very same 20 papers all over the time. But this would be material for a different brainstorm idea

EDIT: Added the "Availability" item