Issue browsing the document after setting the zoom level using the drop-down menu

[wilcobrouwer]

After selecting for example the zoom level "page fit", if would be intuitive and desirable to be able to navigate the document using the arrow keys. Right now pressing an arrow key (even and especially left/right) changes the zoom level, although you just selected the desirable zoom level manually.

EDIT: the same thing holds for the page up and page down keys.

[yurydelendik]

Can you replicate the issue the after you loose focus of the zoom dropdown control? (e.g. by pressing tab key or clicking on the page) That's normal behavior of the dropdown control and we shall not change it.

[wilcobrouwer]

No, it indeed is the normal behavior of the dropdown menu. However, it would still be nice if it could be changed. It's not too logical for the page down key to change the zooming level (4 levels).

[yurydelendik]

Then people that are using just keyboard will not be able to change the zoom to predefined settings. Closing as won't fix for now.

[Rob--W]

@yurydelendik This control is indeed implemented as a dropdown menu, but in most cases, it is used once to switch the zoom level. From multiple users, I've heard that they expect to be able to use arrow keys/page up/down, but that it "does not work after changing the zoom level".

I've tried other document viewers, and most of them work as described by the OP (e.g. Okular, Adobe PDF Viewer).

People can still change the zoom to presets when they use the keyboard, because the changes are only applied after pressing Enter. And after changing the zoom level to say, "Page Fit", it is very likely that they just want to navigate through the PDF using the keyboard.

[yurydelendik]

@Rob--W, are you suggesting to loose the focus of the control when mouse is used?

[Rob--W]

@yurydelendik Yes. Further, I find the keyboard argument for zoom not very convincing, because it is already difficult to reach the dropdown via zoom only (tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-[Enter]-arrow key(s)-[Enter]). If access to the dropdown is an issue, then we could put an accesskey attribute on the <select> tag for easy access.

[yurydelendik]

I've tried other document viewers, and most of them work as described by the OP (e.g. Okular, Adobe PDF Viewer).

There are different controls are used in those: shall we replace dropdown with separate buttons or menu?

[Rob--W]

Grouping related functionality (Zoom page fit, zoom page width, zoom level X%) in a dropdown makes sense. If we put every item on a separate button, the UI quickly gets too cluttered.

FWIW, in Okular, the dropdown looks like ours: