Hi, Flaviano! I just tried out jPdfBookmarks for the first time and thought I'd share some of my experience in the hope that it will help the project. I apologize for the length of this feedback. Please see this not as one overly long message, but ten short snippets that can be read individually at your leisure. If you only have time to read one of them, the most important is #1: adding links.
Experience: I had heard that this program would let me add links from the table of contents in a scanned book to the appropriate pages. I appear to have been mistaken. jPdfBookmarks can only add the links to the outline on the side, which is sort of like a table of contents, but is not the same as the one printed in a book.
Suggestion: Perhaps it could be stated more clearly on the description page that the term "Bookmarks" is what most PDF programs call the "Index" or "Outline" and that jPdfBookmarks does not add links.
*Suggestion: Consider adding the ability to highlight a number in the document and turn it into a hyperlink to that page. *
Experience: Despite the negative review someone left saying that this program is slow, it opened up a 260 page book scanned at high resolution quite quickly on my machine. Admittedly, I have a machine with more than enough RAM and oodles of processors. However, contrast LibreOffice 7 which struggled with the same document, often freezing up for a long time (minutes) blocking on some process churning on a single core of one CPU. jPdfBookmarks is clearly better at multithreading, and that's what matters these days.
Suggestion: None, but kudos to the author!
Experience: To install the program, I had to create a link to a shell script. I know this is a problem for some people using certain operating systems, but I use Debian GNU/Linux and actually prefer that method. Why should an installer program splat files all over the place when I can just drop a symlink in /usr/local/bin? It was pleasant to see that jPdfBookmarks does it right.
Suggestion: Again, plaudits to the author. The only thing I can think to suggest is to avoid using readlink(1) since realpath(1) is now the preferred method for finding the canonical path. But, that's incredibly minor.
Experience: Upon first run, the End User License Agreement is shown prominently. Usually, I bristle at having to contractually signing away my rights just to use a program, but this time it made me smile. It was the GNU General Public License, the "copyleft" which ensures everyone's rights.
Suggestion: None. I wish more programs displayed the GPL this way!
Experience: I tried to scroll using a scroll wheel and found it quite frustrating. Scrolling back would suddenly jump to the previous page when I did not intend to. I'd then have to scroll forward until the page was 100% off the screen before the next one would appear.
Suggestion: Change the scrolling limits so that the page has to be 10% off the screen before flipping either forward or backward.
Experience: The jPdfBookmarks user interface is easily discoverable, with mouse-over text for most widgets. For example, I would never have guessed the meaning for the icon for "Extract links from current page and add them as bookmarks" without the help popup. However, there are three checkboxes labeled "Inherit zoom/scroll" which seem very important given their prominence, but show no information when hovered.
Suggestion: Add a brief usage statement when the mouse hovers over the "Inherit" checkboxes.
Experience: I clicked on the "Author's Blog" button and it took me to a page which was last updated over a decade ago. I was concerned about the author's health, so I googled the name "Flaviano Petrocchi" and found a YouTube account that also was fallow. I checked SourceForge where I had downloaded the program and found that the last update of jPdfBookmarks was in 2011. At that point, I was presuming the worst, but then I found that the author has responded to some bug reports on this site as recently as 2022. Hurray!
Suggestion: Remove the button that goes to the blog or change it to point to this forum.
Experience: The Window menu doesn't actually show a list of open windows. Instead it has one submenu, "Look & Feel". While it is amusing to see an emulation of the old CDE/Motif style widgets (even using badly aliased fonts — talk about attention to detail!) , it seems odd to make an entire menu option just for this. Does it affect cross-platform usability?
*Suggestion: Perhaps move Look & Feel to the "Options" pane. *
Experience: There is a toolbar to the left of the Bookmarks panel which is made up of multiple toolbars. I accidentally dragged one of them and somehow dropped it back in sideways (the column got wider). I tried to undo the mistake and things only got worse as the toolbars would not go where I dropped them. It was confusing and frustrating.
Suggestion: Add a "reset to default" option in the right-click context menu and in Tools → Options → Toolbars Manager.
Experience: I expected double-clicking on a bookmark's name to allow me to rename it, but instead that is what is used to activate the linked page.
Suggestion: If the option to activate bookmarks is set to single-click, then double-click should act the same as clicking the Rename button for that page.
Thank you for taking the time to read my experience and suggestions. I hope it wasn't too long. I only shared so much because I appreciate the work you've put into jPdfBookmarks.
Last edit: hackerb9 2023-03-16
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hi, thank you for taking the time to write such an extensive and well-structured feedback. At the moment my career commitments for the company I work for do not allow me to work on the project myself, this may not be a problem since the software is open source, but for the moment nobody has really stepped forward to take in hand the development or fork the code. However, I will treasure your suggestions and observations should I find a way to finance the further development of the project with some kind of fund or if my commitments should allow me to work on it personally.
Thanks and my best regards.
❤️
1
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hi, Flaviano! I just tried out jPdfBookmarks for the first time and thought I'd share some of my experience in the hope that it will help the project. I apologize for the length of this feedback. Please see this not as one overly long message, but ten short snippets that can be read individually at your leisure. If you only have time to read one of them, the most important is #1: adding links.
Experience: I had heard that this program would let me add links from the table of contents in a scanned book to the appropriate pages. I appear to have been mistaken. jPdfBookmarks can only add the links to the outline on the side, which is sort of like a table of contents, but is not the same as the one printed in a book.
Experience: Despite the negative review someone left saying that this program is slow, it opened up a 260 page book scanned at high resolution quite quickly on my machine. Admittedly, I have a machine with more than enough RAM and oodles of processors. However, contrast LibreOffice 7 which struggled with the same document, often freezing up for a long time (minutes) blocking on some process churning on a single core of one CPU. jPdfBookmarks is clearly better at multithreading, and that's what matters these days.
Experience: To install the program, I had to create a link to a shell script. I know this is a problem for some people using certain operating systems, but I use Debian GNU/Linux and actually prefer that method. Why should an installer program splat files all over the place when I can just drop a symlink in /usr/local/bin? It was pleasant to see that jPdfBookmarks does it right.
Experience: Upon first run, the End User License Agreement is shown prominently. Usually, I bristle at having to contractually signing away my rights just to use a program, but this time it made me smile. It was the GNU General Public License, the "copyleft" which ensures everyone's rights.
Experience: I tried to scroll using a scroll wheel and found it quite frustrating. Scrolling back would suddenly jump to the previous page when I did not intend to. I'd then have to scroll forward until the page was 100% off the screen before the next one would appear.
Experience: The jPdfBookmarks user interface is easily discoverable, with mouse-over text for most widgets. For example, I would never have guessed the meaning for the icon for "Extract links from current page and add them as bookmarks" without the help popup. However, there are three checkboxes labeled "Inherit zoom/scroll" which seem very important given their prominence, but show no information when hovered.
Experience: I clicked on the "Author's Blog" button and it took me to a page which was last updated over a decade ago. I was concerned about the author's health, so I googled the name "Flaviano Petrocchi" and found a YouTube account that also was fallow. I checked SourceForge where I had downloaded the program and found that the last update of jPdfBookmarks was in 2011. At that point, I was presuming the worst, but then I found that the author has responded to some bug reports on this site as recently as 2022. Hurray!
Experience: The Window menu doesn't actually show a list of open windows. Instead it has one submenu, "Look & Feel". While it is amusing to see an emulation of the old CDE/Motif style widgets (even using badly aliased fonts — talk about attention to detail!) , it seems odd to make an entire menu option just for this. Does it affect cross-platform usability?
Experience: There is a toolbar to the left of the Bookmarks panel which is made up of multiple toolbars. I accidentally dragged one of them and somehow dropped it back in sideways (the column got wider). I tried to undo the mistake and things only got worse as the toolbars would not go where I dropped them. It was confusing and frustrating.
Experience: I expected double-clicking on a bookmark's name to allow me to rename it, but instead that is what is used to activate the linked page.
Thank you for taking the time to read my experience and suggestions. I hope it wasn't too long. I only shared so much because I appreciate the work you've put into jPdfBookmarks.
Last edit: hackerb9 2023-03-16
Hi, thank you for taking the time to write such an extensive and well-structured feedback. At the moment my career commitments for the company I work for do not allow me to work on the project myself, this may not be a problem since the software is open source, but for the moment nobody has really stepped forward to take in hand the development or fork the code. However, I will treasure your suggestions and observations should I find a way to finance the further development of the project with some kind of fund or if my commitments should allow me to work on it personally.
Thanks and my best regards.