Feature suggestion: personal bookmarks (separately stored)

[halabund]

Here's a suggestion for a feature that I would find extremely useful:

Allow setting "personal bookmarks" that are stored separately, not in the PDF. The WinDjView DJVU viewer has this feature, if any of you know that piece of software.

Standard PDF bookmarks are normally used as a table of context (or index) to a document, which is completely different from the purpose of traditional (physical) bookmarks, which are just used to mark a page in a book, so the reader can come back to it later. What I'm asking for is an equivalent of the traditional, personal bookmarks.

I would find it useful to have the possibility to (temporarily) mark pages/views in PDF documents. I do not want these markers to be stored in the PDF, for several reasons: they are for personal use; I don't want other people (to whom I might want to send to the PDF) to see them because they wouldn't find them useful anyway; it should be possible to set these markers even on protected documents, after all they're just the equivalent of memorizing the page number (except infinitely more convenient). The markers could be stored separately, e.g. together with the application settings.

At the moment I often have several views of a PDF document open (for example, while reading an article, I might keep an oft-referenced graph or table open in a separate window, so I can switch to it quickly). But after having used WinDjView for a while, I found that the possibility of having a list of page/view bookmarks is often much more convenient. It would be really useful for me if this feature were added to a PDF viewer as well, so I could use it with PDFs too (not on DJVU documents).

Would the developers of PDF-XChange viewer consider this feature?

[BigMike]

I'd like to support this request.
I like the idea much, and I've got some protected ebooks in pdf format in which I often need to look in several - but commonly the same places.

For now I'm doing this, by creating links besides the pdf with corresponding names, to open the pdf on the desired page.

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"<PathToViewer>\PDFXCview.exe"  /A "page=<Number>" "<PDF Name>.pdf"

But a bookmark menu - like in common internet browsers - would be a nice feature. So that I just go to

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Bookmarks -> Add this page

and would get a menu entry which will load the pdf on the bookmarked page. Maybe in the form of a submenu per document, so that I can select it by

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Bookmarks -> <DocumentNameOrTitle> -> <CustomBookmarkName>

or with completely customizable submenus, like in browsers.

It's a bit like the stickies in the opened document list - but more customizable and you get the document opened on the page you like.

Kind regards, Michael

[halabund]

Is there any chance that Tracker would consider this feature? I hope I managed to explain why this would be a great convenience feature for many of us, especially those who read long technical ebooks. I am not aware of any PDF viewers that have this functionality, so this could be a new and innovative feature that PDF XChange introduces.

The viewer already remembers the last view settings for each document. To reach parity with the WinDjVu feature I described above, it would be necessary to let the user store any number of document views (e.g. as a list in a sidebar), and to associate these view lists with the document in a more robust way than by simply using the filesystem path (I'm not sure how WinDjVu manages to do this, but it works nicely. Unless I'm mistaken, many PDFs already contain unique identifiers, so this should be workable without doing something unreasonably slow like calculating a checksum for the whole file.)

It appears that there is a genuine demand for something like this. There are even some hacks to extend Adobe Reader with this functionality:

http://www.pdfhacks.com/bookmark_page/

(But it is quite unwieldy to use. Nowhere nearly as easy and convenient as WinDjVu's implementation)

[halabund]

Another thought: PDF (and computer-based solutions in general) are moving closer and closer to being able to replace traditional paper. To move forward and introduce genuinely innovative features, one has to consider what it is that people can do easily and conveniently with paper (books, notebooks, etc.), but cannot with electronic documents. And then figure out how those things can be made possible in the world of PDFs, without losing their utility. People often use small pieces of coloured paper to bookmark often used textbooks/referece books while studying. This is what I'd like to have a solution for when using PDFs. I'm sure the Tracker team could come up with a really good solution, perhaps even better than what WinDjVu has now.

Other software is moving in this direction too: making it possible to do those things on a computer that used to be more convenient on paper. For example, Mendeley, a tool for organizing research papers, has an annotation feature too, and uses separately stored annotations (although it is possible to merge them permanently into the doc)

[Vasyl-Tracker Dev Team]

Very interesting thoughts. Thank You.
We will try to add this possibility in the new version of our program.

It can be look like a separate floating window(or/and the drop-down menu) with favorites list(tree).
Favorites can represented as:

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filename1
   viewpos1(with preview)
   viewpos2(with preview)
   ...
filename2
   viewpos1(with preview)
   viewpos2(with preview)
...

or as:

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Group1
   item1(filename1:viewpos1)
   Group12
       item1(filename2:viewpos3)
       item2(filename1:viewpos2)
...

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<viewpos>=<preview>+<custom tag>+<position info>

Cheers.

[BigMike]

Thank you Vasyl, this sounds great I'm looking forward to it.

Kind regards, Michael

[halabund]

Thank you very much for considering this feature! This forum really shows that Tracker cares considerably more about their users than many other companies.

There is just one note that I would like to add: For me personally, a one-click accessible solution (like a separate floating window or a sidebar) would be more useful than something that requires multiple clicks and mouse movements, like a submenu of an existing menu. However, if you really get around to implementing this feature, it will be very useful for many people, no matter what specific implementation you decide on.

Thank you again,
H

[Chris - Tracker Supp]

Thanks for the suggestion, we always appreciate your input.