Saturday, March 20, 2010

JPdfBookmars-2.2.0

JPdfBookmarks version 2.2.0 is out, download it from source-forge. This release resolves the HeadlessException bug affecting servers without a graphic environment and adds some new experimental features requested by users.
Now browsing through the pages is easier, if you continue to scroll a page up or down  past its scrolling limits, using the mouse or the keyboard, you are taken to the previous or next page, this increases usability a lot in my opinion.

On some platforms (on Windows for sure) it is now possible to drag and drop a PDF file over the JPdfBookmarks main panel to open it.
From the command line is now possible to add a bookmark pointing to another PDF file using the form:



Chapter 1/9,Black,notBold,notItalic,open,FitWidth,206,GoToFile,file.pdf

I tried to implement the same possibility in the GUI but is still very experimental, anyway if you want to try it you have to open another instance of jpdfbookmarks to open the target PDF and create there the bookmark you want, copy it with CTRL+C or with the context menu, then go back to the other instance and paste with CTRL+V or context menu.

Another feature requested by you, and now available, is the possibility to use the command line to modify a PDF to show bookmarks as soon as it is opened in a viewer, it is done with the --show-on-open (-w is the short form) argument which takes CHECK, YES or NO as parameters (not case sensitive and c, y or n are the short forms). For example:

jpdfbookmarks --show-on-open check file.pdf

will print YES or NO to tell you what is the current setting;

jpdfbookmarks -w y file.pdf -o output.pdf

will create a copy of file.pdf named output.pdf that will show bookmarks as soon as opened in a viewer.

I hope you will find useful these new features as I do, there are probably many bugs but I hope you will help me to find them with comments and reports.

Thank you, best regards.

2 comments:

Graham Conroy Harris said...

Hi Flavian,

Thanks for the product, seems one of very few that can both view and create bookmarks in PDFs- especially for Linux. I have it working well in Ubuntu 9.10.

Just one thing though, the UI is rather full and takes away a lot of the screen space I would use for just reading the PDF. Is there any way to turn off all the toolbars and make the bookmark panel at the left much narrower please?

flavianopetrocchi said...

Hello Graham, I confirm that problem and I will try to modify the UI in the next version to be more Gnome friendly, maybe using smaller icons for tool-bars will help, or being able to hide some of them, or both. At present there is little you can do without hacking the code and recompiling the application, try to make one or two of the tool-bars in the panel floating tool-bars, by dragging them away with your mouse, that will let you shrink the panel.
Thank you very much for your post I will address the problem soon and the next version will be much better.

Best regards.