Proposed patches to history

Submitted by Casey Jao @casey.jao

Link to original bug (#785627)

Description

There have been many complaints in the past with the behavior of history in Evince. I would like to propose some fixes.

Currently, EvHistory listens for the “page-changed” signal and adds a page to the history when the new page differs from the old page by >1. This leads to all sorts of inconsistencies and frustrating behavior:

• One cannot go back to the old page since it is currently not added to the history. This makes reading technical papers quite frustrating since one often would like to jump to an equation or bibliographical reference and return to where one left off. There have been some proposals to add both the old page and the new page to the history, but so far no patches appear to have been merged. (Bug 710681)

• Such a fix would not address the case when the target of the link is on the next page. For instance, if one navigates through an article in the following order 1->2->3->4->5 and then jumps to an equation which happens to be on page 6, then pressing the back button would yank one back to page 1.

• Any easy fix of course would be to have EvHistory keep track of every page change (reference). However some Evince developers have previously objected to such behavior; thus only page increments of 2 or more are recorded. (Bug 696891). Consequently, ordinary scrolling in dual page mode causes many pages to be added to the history since the page number always jumps by at least 2. There is no reason dual page mode should behave different from single page mode with respect to the history.

Also, currently the Alt+P and Alt+N shortcuts to jump backward and forward in history don’t work. (Bug 781323)

Version: 3.24.x