A small Viewer wishlist

[skreisel]

Hi there,
just a couple of things on my mind:
- When extracting a page and then saving it, the (additional) metadata is not retained from the original document (the stuff in the document information dictionary, however, is).
- When cropping a page one should be able to zoom in.
- When highlighting a bit of text there should be an option to automatically turn it into a bookmark; as things are now, one has to mark the text, then right-click to bookmark, then highlight. Once highlighted, there's no way to add a bookmark to that piece of text.
- Tab drag and drop functionality to outside of the Viewer. That would be handy when using citation managers; take EndNote: one could drag the tab onto an open window of EndNote and have the PDF be attached to the reference as a file on-the-fly. As things are now, one needs to right-click the tab, open the containing folder, drag the file to the citation manager...
- Be able to highlight text on top of already highlighted text. Say you have a paragraph of relevant information with two pivotal points in it - it would be cool if one could then use different colors to highlight those bits, even if there are pieces of text relevant to both points.
- Ask if previously opened tabs should be re-opened for that session. You've got numerous PDFs opened because you're working on a research project. The next day around you just want to look a a PDF version of you're telephone bill without having to open all those PDFs, while retaining them when you get back to work on your project. It basically boils down to the wish of having something like a session- or group-manager.
Cheers
Stefan

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Stefan,

And thank you for your suggestions.
I think that most of your requests are already considered and will now try to answer each of them.
I will use numbers and follow the order you have, so that I can both keep it clear and brief.

1) You are basically creating a new file, so new metadata is created for that file
2) The whole Viewer interface will be greatly redesigned for ver3, so I believe the crop window would be revamped as well.
3) You could use a shortcut to create a bookmark out of your selected text (default Ctrl + Shift + B) and then highlight the text as needed. If you want to select a text that is already highlighted just hold down the Shift Key to "ignore" the highlight and be able to select the text directly.
4) This has been requested already and is on the radar, but whether and when (it might be in a later build of ver3) it will be implemented is up to the dev team.
5) Use the Shift Key mentioned in 3
6) We currently support just one session and why we have decided it to be just one is discussed already in other topics. The main reason is that unlike web browsers (and their sessions of websites that don't change by the minute) - we are working with the local file system, and files could be moved/deleed by many means. Whether a multi session support will be implemented in ver3 is again up to the devs.

If you have not seen this topic:
https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/ ... 35&t=10100
Please have a quick look at what is confirmed as coming up in ver3.

Best,
Stefan

[skreisel]

Thanks for the quick reply!
ad 1.) and 4.):
As you may have noticed, I work a lot with scientific papers. I - like many of my colleagues - go through a painstaking process of systematically naming and adding meta-data to the PDF (in our case its a bibtex XMP stream (using a tool called cb2bib), with author, keywords, journal title, even the abstract of the publication; but it basically holds for other ways of doing so e.g. using Mendeley). If I find an interesting table or figure, I extract the page and crop it down to the plot - and then save it with the name of the original manuscript (makes re-finding things a lot easier). That's the reason I'd like the XMP meta-data to be (optionally) copied to the new document; the Viewer does so, it just seems its limited to the stuff in the document information dictionary... The drag and drop request would really be neat!
ad 6.):
The wish for a session manager goes in the same direction. At present some of us are using SciPlore (its a Freemind derivative). We drag our relevant papers onto the interface and basically generate a grouping of PDF information for a specific piece of work. If the Viewer would allow something similar, one could open the collection and voila - clearly it would be limited to those folks that keep their PDF library (and names) together. It just a thought.
ad the rest:
Thanks for pointing me to the short-cuts!
Cheers
Stefan

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Stefan,

For the metadata - while not a straight forward solution it might still be faster than having to include all the metadata in a new file. Try creating a copy of the file, and then delete the unwanted pages this should preserve all the metadata you have added to the original.

4 and 6 could change in ver3 of the Viewer and we have noted your comments on them, so lets see how the initial build of ver3 will look like and we can always revive this topic later

Best,
Stefan