Unexpected and inconsistent document margins/padding scaling behaviour
The layout behaviour relative to document size/zoom is unexpected (and inefficient). I believe this is related to document padding/margin constraints.
I will demonstrate this in two ways:
- Using the zoom drop-down
- Using 'manual' mouse-wheel + Ctrl
This is evaluated in GNOME Document Viewer 3.36.7 running on Ubuntu 20.04.
Zoom drop-down
In the zoom(%) drop-down selector in the tool bar there are a few options. The Fit Page and Fit Width button/check boxes are of interest.
Using Fit Page - To replicate open any regularly sized multi-page PDF document (e.g., A4):
- Make the Evince window comfortably/quite wide.
- Click/Select the 'Fit Page' button from the drop-down toolbar.
- Confirm a full page height fits perfectly in the window with a thin padding above and below the page.
- Now slowly reduce the width of the Evince window.
- Result: The side/horizontal margins reduce until at a certain point the document begins to zoom out/shrink. Note the state of the horizontal margin width at this point.
- I am not questioning whether the document should scale automatically (but perhaps that should be an option?).
- Expected: The document should only begin to scale when the horizontal margins are much narrower, such as the width of the vertical top/bottom margins.
Using Fit Width - To replicate open any regularly sized multi-page PDF document (e.g., A4):
- Click/Select the 'Fit Width' button from the drop-down toolbar.
- Modify the width of the Evince window.
- Note the thick horizontal padding/margin.
- Expected: The horizontal padding should remain narrow/thin when scaling the Evince window.
- Currently this forces you to have large bands of empty space making window tiling inefficient.
Mouse-wheel zoom
It is possible to scale a document using the Ctrl + mouse wheel. Note that Evince will try to zoom to the PDF document location where the cursor is overlaid on.
To replicate open any regularly sized multi-page PDF document (e.g., A4):
- Enlarge/zoom-into the document while keeping your mouse cursor on the left margin or on the left side of the document.
- Result: Both margins shrink and disappear as the document enlarges. The right margin tends to persist longer than the left.
- Expected: Either the right margin shrinks faster than the left or both margins shrink at the same rate.
- It is impossible to zoom in and see much of the left margin (as expected).
To replicate open any regularly sized multi-page PDF document (e.g., A4):
- Enlarge/zoom-into the document while keeping your mouse cursor on the right margin or on the right side of the document.
- Result: The left margin shrinks and disappear as the document enlarges. The right margin persists, staying the same size or widening a little.
- Expected: Either the left margin shrinks faster than the right (which it does but the right margin is not narrowing), or both margins shrink at the same rate.