[Okular-devel] Consistency in user interface

[Jonathan Schultz]

Hello all,

I hope I'm not wading into a discussion about UI without understanding 
the background here, but is there any good reason for the different 
behaviour of Okular depending on the selection modes? That is, in 
'normal' (ie rectangle) selection mode, a menu of options appears 
immediately you release the left mouse button. In text selection mode, 
you need to make a right click or use the menu to do anything with your 
selection. Meanwhile in table selection mode you can't do anything other 
than divide up the table until you hit the escape key. This is all very 
inconsistent, not only with other GUIs, but even internally to Okular, 
and violates the principle that modes of operation should be kept to a 
minimum.

I would like to suggest that the operation be standardised around the 
current behaviour in text selection mode, as this is standard GUI 
behaviour. In addition to eliminating the current inconsistency, this 
would permit a wider range of context-dependent options to be made 
available via right-click. We could also (eventually) do more fancy 
things like allow compound selections, even of different kinds and get 
rid of the zoom tool entirely, by making 'zoom to selection' and 'zoom 
out' as right-click options, depending on whether or not there is an 
active selection. None of this seems very difficult to do at all - the 
code is all in ui/pageview.cpp and it would simply be a question of 
rearranging the functions that handle mouse button presses and releases.

FYI the reason why I am interested in this is that I am working on using 
Okular as the basis for a mark-up/tagging tool for qualitative research, 
as a part of which I need to extend the range of functions that can be 
applied to selections. See a brief discussion here: 
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/okular-devel/2015-November/021920.html 
and the code itself here: https://github.com/jschultz/okular-tagging

Cheers,
Jonathan