Feature request (Android): Option to disable bottom preview bar on PDFs

xodan
Hi @all,

first of all, thanks all for the great work, I really appreciate it!

So I have the following problem:

When viewing PDFs in the Zotero Android app on a tablet, a horizontal bar with page thumbnails appears at the bottom after tapping the PDF. Tapping it again hides the bar.

However, when using a stylus to write or annotate, I often accidentally tap the preview bar, which causes unwanted navigation to another page. This interrupts my workflow and makes annotating difficult.

I would like to request an option to disable or hide this bottom thumbnail preview bar entirely, to avoid accidental touches while using a pen for annotation.

I guess this problem just not affects Android.
  • dstillman
    Hiding the page scrubber doesn't really make sense — it's the main way to navigate to arbitrary locations in the PDF (other than swiping/tapping a page at a time).

    But can you not switch into full-screen mode — where the toolbar and page scrubber are hidden — while annotating? Or are you saying you're accidentally tapping once to show them and then accidentally tapping again to change pages?

    While accidental taps are no good, note that there's also a back button that appears after you change pages via the scrubber.
  • xodan
    I don’t get why you say it doesn’t make sense, that’s literally how I read documents, page by page. I don’t need to jump 200 pages ahead.

    And this should really be up to the user. Let them decide if they want to enable or disable it and how they prefer to navigate. That’s exactly why I’m suggesting it as an option, which can be disabled by default.

    What I mean is, I use my pen to write something on the PDF, and sometimes my palm touches the screen and triggers the lower bar to show up. While writing, I keep moving my hand, and if I am unlucky, I place my palm right on top of the bar and suddenly jump to a random page.
  • xodan
    And as far as I know Zotero does not have a full screen mode, at least not on android
  • dstillman
    edited today at 2:48pm
    (We're happy to discuss things here, but it's best to just explain the problem you're experiencing, not demand a specific solution and insist it should be "up to the user". You're not understanding the full context here.)

    You keep talking about just the lower bar showing up, but that's not what's happening. The toolbar and page scrubber appear and disappear together on tap. "Full-screen mode" is the mode where the toolbar and page scrubber are hidden. [Update: But there's a bug when changing the highlight color.]

    In addition to providing navigation, the page scrubber shows you where you are in the document, including after you press Back or Forward (which appear next to it). So just adding an option to hide a core UI element is not a good solution.
    What I mean is, I use my pen to write something on the PDF, and sometimes my palm touches the screen and triggers the lower bar to show up.
    Right, so then it's a problem of palm rejection not working properly, not a problem with the UI. An accidentally registered touch could just as easily — in fact, more easily — trigger other actions, including a page turn, annotation creation, or annotation edit.

    We can check whether palm rejection is working in general. It's also possible that palm rejection just isn't working properly on your device.
  • xodan
    I think you are making things way too complicated.

    "So just adding an option to hide a core UI element is not a good solution."

    You literally decide how a user wants and should use the tool, that is not up to you to decide. Again, nobody said to make this a default setting, its literally a button you can turn on or off to disable features, you can even add something like advanced settings to hide it etc.

  • dstillman
    edited today at 3:19pm
    Again, just demanding that we add a pref — which has significant downsides — for what you've mistakenly decided the problem is is not going to be productive for you (here or at most other software projects). You don't seem to fully understand the issue and don't seem willing to engage with what I've tried to explain, so I'm not going to waste more time on this. I'd encourage you to reconsider your approach before posting here again.

    If you want to open a new thread about palm rejection not working properly, we can debug that further.
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