Feature requests and minor bug

[PseudoRandom]

I have recently found PDF-XChange having tried many PDF viewers, some good, some not so good. I'd like to congratulate Tracker Software for producing what must be the fastest and friendliest viewer I've had the pleasure to use. The load-program-and-open-document speed in particular is vey impressive and I hope you can sustain that for future versions. Other than the fairly trivial points below, I can find little to suggest as improvement after a couple of days' use.

On to the feature requests...

1) A rival product (am I allowed to say who?) has a handy addition to the print scaling options - "remove margins". This means whitespace around the document can "absorb" the printer margins rather than having to shrink the whole document to accomodate the printer margin. Effectively using "no scaling" except it will print to smaller page sizes than specified by the document (or another way is to pretend the printer margins are zero). An extension to this could be for it to shrink to fit only if non-whitespace would encroach the print margins. I can untidily achieve the same effect by playing with the custom scaling.

2) On a high resolution screen the toolbar is getting quite small. Obviously many people value screen real-estate, but it would be nice to have the option of larger icons. I can sort of get there by making the toolbar font larger, but it doesn't really look right.


Minor printing bug?:

When using "custom" or "none" print scaling, the "auto-rotate and center" option will not rotate even if the document margins are into the printer margins. This means I cannot auto-rotate a custom-scale print intended to simulate the remove-margins feature described above. i.e. Red dotted lines are in the print preview but it isn't rotating the image to fit.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi PseudoRandom,

thanks for the kind words about the Viewer.

We have a new version of the PDF-XChange Viewer coming out very soon we expect. It should be available this Autumn. While we cannot load that release with any additional feature requests this new version is a major step forward for us. There will be a significantly more customizable UI as well as a tonne of new features. Whether the ability to ignore margins will be included in this initial release I cannot say until we are closer to launch. What I suggest we do is wait for V3 and see what it can do. If there is still, at that time, a need for additional features lets revisit the idea then and if necessary we'll make a formal feature request.

Until then the best we can do is wait to see exactly what features make it into the Viewer. Does that work for you?

Sincerely

[PseudoRandom]

I await V3 with interest! Another popular PDF viewer recently made extensive GUI changes at what many users felt was the expense of speed and usability. I'm sure all your users are eager to see how well PDF-XChange fares.

As for feature requests - if they've been squirrelled away for future consideration I can ask no more. Thank you for reading and considering them.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

HI PseudoRandom

interesting. Do you have any related reading links?

[PseudoRandom]

Well something like this discussion of Foxit shows how GUI overhauls can garner very negative reactions. This reader gained popularity as a fast lightweight reader and has gradually become slower and less accessible. The change referred to here added little real functionality, just eye-candy, whilst breaking and slowing various features.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Thanks PseudoRandom,

that makes very interesting reading indeed. Thanks for that.