Interface Irregularites

[thesamedirection]

Just experimented with annotating my first PDF.

1. I like the range of tools offered. This is a very promising piece of software. Here are a few items having to do with the keyboard interface while annotating.
2. When placing a rectangle (or other shape), after the first placement point is chosen, ESC should cancel the placement process. At present, if you accidentally do a stray click with that tool on, you have to finish placing the rectangle, then delete it.
3. ESC should also remove the 'selection' (the resizing squares) after placing a rectangle, in case you want to keep reading without them being in your way. Right now you have to click somewhere on the document to get them removed, but that lands you with problem (2). A minor frustration, but a frustration nonetheless! In my opinion (also) clicking anywhere while a rectangle is selected should not start a new rectangle, but just quit the selection (just like pressing the ESC should).
4. CTRL-Z does not 'undo' your just-placed rectangle. It should.
5. ESC deletes all the contents of a recently entered sticky note if you are still 'in' the note. I don't like this at all. It's not normal Windows behaviour (and it stings us 'vi' users who press ESC routinely while editing). Perhaps use SHIFT- or CTRL- DEL for such behaviour. ESC should (IMHO) do nothing in that context, except perhaps 'deselect' current sticky note, if that seems useful.
6. Also CTRL-Z doesn't get such deleted text back. It should.
7. It would be nice to have keboard commands associated with the various annotation tools, especially the most used ones.
8. It would be even nicer to be able to assign keys to those commands.

Other issues:

9. I work a lot with PDFs that I have scanned myself. Bits of books or articles, but they are of course images of the text, not text-pdfs. Would there be any way to enable highlighting of text from these? The simple way would be to enable a simple yellow rectangle, placed just like the line rectangle. A more sophisticated and surely more difficult approach could actually minimally 'parse' the image based on lines and words, and allow for highlighting, say, a sentence which starts in the middle of a line and ends in the middle of the next line.

10. The 'How to Report Bugs' on the 'Support' page is broken.
11. The 'Forum Rules & Regs' posting is not visible, even to registered forum users. ("You do not have the required permissions to read topics within this forum." Hmm? I can read everything else, and even post this.)

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

1. Agreed.
2. Cannot confirm with any of the shape tools, or sticky notes, only text boxes and callouts.
3. Ditto
4. Already reported many times. Will be fixed when its ready.
5. A bit naughty. Fixing undo would help to resolve this.
6. See above
7. Not very useful unless you can choose the commands
8. Guess what? Right-click on any toolbar to open the customise dialogue.
9. You can draw transparent rectangles or polygons
10. Couldn't find this page
11. Confirmed.

[John - Tracker Supp]

Hi,

This thread is being reviewed - thanks for the comments - with regards the forum...:

10. The 'How to Report Bugs' on the 'Support' page is broken.

Could you please send me the link you ahve to that page ? Thanks

11. The 'Forum Rules & Regs' posting is not visible, even to registered forum users. ("You do not have the required permissions to read topics within this forum." Hmm? I can read everything else, and even post this.)
Should be fixed now.

Thanks

[ksudavid]

Of all the suggestions listed I would like to add my support to the ESC key suggestions. Even though I know it won't work I am constantly trying to cancel out of a command using ESC because that methodology is consisitent with so many other software applications.

Out of curiosity, how do you cancel a command other than choosing a new one.

Thanks,
David

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

As far as I can tell, the action of all of the tools can be cancelled by pressing escape, except for the Text Box tool and the Callout Tool.

I recommend customising the tools with a shortcut so that you can quickly switch between tools. I have many defined, e.g.

Ctrl Space = Hand Tool
T = Typewriter
Shift T = Text Select Tool, etc.

• Right-click on any toolbar to bring up the Customise Dialogue.
• Select the Commands Tab.
• Select Tools
• Select a Tool and click on Properties to set a shortcut for it.

Watch a short Video Tutorial on YouTube: PDF-XChange - Customise Tools

[benradu]

For 2 and 3 I did this:
Right click on any toolbar
Customize->Commands->Tools->Hand Tool->Properties
Here I assigned Esc for the shortcut (by default assigned to Exit full screen)
The result is exactly what you want.
BR

[ksudavid]

Thanks benradu,

That is a clever work around that should work great.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Here I assigned Esc for the shortcut (by default assigned to Exit full screen)
The result is exactly what you want.

I tried it, but when I pressed Escape while drawing a Distance Line PDF-XChange crashed.

I had no such problem when using Escape when it was assigned to Exit Fullscreen.

[ksudavid]

He's right. You can't use it to exit the Distance Tool without crashing. Fortunately I never use this tool.

[benradu]

Strange, I just tried the distance tool in both scenarios (2 and 3). No crash for me!
BR

[ksudavid]

If you are in the process of placing a distance dimension (i.e. clicked for the first point but not the 2nd) it crashes. Once you place the dimension you can ESC without problem.

[benradu]

I tried exactly what you said. Still no crash for me.
However, I have to press Esc twice, 1 for canceling the dimension placement and 2nd to cancel the dimension tool selection.
Are we using different versions? Mine is build 40.7 (Nov 25 2008).
BR

[ksudavid]

Same build. I running Windows XP32 SP2 and I crash every time.

[benradu]

Same here.
Sorry
Update: I tried the same at home and it crashed... Then I reopened the viewer and tried again. No more problems since then.
I guess we need a little help from the developers to clarify this.

[Ivan - Tracker Software]

Bhikkhu: Can you send me your settings of the the viewer via email? (Ivan@tracker-software.com)

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Settings file sent by email.

[Ivan - Tracker Software]

Problem reproduced, thanks Bhikkhu.

Trouble is because measure tool (and all drawing tools too) doesn't expect tool changing (which happens since you set Esc to hand tool) during adding new comment.

This incident pushes us to change command handling as soon as possible. We had plan to do so long time ago, but always there was no time