[Okular-devel] Consistency in user interface

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Friday 26 February 2016, a les 10:52:45, Jonathan Schultz va escriure:
> 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.

They operate differently because they do different things, after drawing the 
rectange there's nothing else you want to do so the menu is triggered 
immediately. On the table selection mode, you need to "draw" the table in 
multiple strokes, so you need a way to get out of it (i.e. escape). The text 
selection mode works like other text selection modes.

I find they are quite consistent in how you want to use them.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> 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
> 
> 
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