KPDF - App of the Month
We also have an interview with the developer of KPDF, Albert Astals Cid.
Description of KPDF by Markus Grob
Reviewed by Lauri
KPDF is included in the kdegraphics module of KDE and will be already installed if you have KDE 3.4 installed. An older version of KPDF was included in KDE 3.3 but a great many improvements have been made since then.
Introduction
You will probably use KPDF for the first time without even knowing; If you open a PDF document from Konqueror it will be opened inside Konqueror, because it can use KPDF as a plug in.
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Overview of the workplace
If you start KPDF manually you will see a gray area at the right side and thin white area on the left titled Thumbnails.
When you open a PDF document you can see little thumbnails of the pages on the left hand side, while the first page of the document is shown at the right hand side.
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Viewing a Document
Anyone who thinks viewing is a simple thing is making a mistake. There are a lot of different settings and all of them useful.
The default mode is continuous scroll, if you move the mousewheel, drag the scrollbar or press the arrow up-/down key, the page will scroll. You can change this by clicking on the "continuous" button. It is pictured with a page and shows as tooltip Continuous. In this mode, only one page will be displayed at a time. If you scroll it will skip directly the next page.
If you would like to see two pages at the same time press the "Two Pages" button. It is directly beside the continuous button and you can see the two pages on the icon. If you scroll then two pages will be scrolled beside each other. Is the scrolling switched off, the pages will be shifted from the left to the right side and reverse. The picture below shows you the scrolling of two pictures.
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To show the difference, the next picture has it set to one side and fixed.
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One option not available in the toolbar by default is the presentation mode, which can be found at the top of the View menu. If you choose it you will view the document as if it was a presentation.
Although static, in many cases this could replace presentation software.
At the right hand side you will see which page is shown and through the form of a watch you are shown how many pages will follow. You could browse with the mouse button (right, left), the mouse scrollwheel or with the arrow-keys (right, left).
You can leave presentation mode with the Esc key.
Thumbnails
Until now we have mainly worked with the main page, but there is also the left hand section of the screen as well which can be very helpful, especially if you are browsing through a big document.
It shows every page displayed as a thumbnail and this makes it possible to scroll to the pages without the necessity to view the whole page. After a click on the thumbnail the chosen page will be displayed in the main window.
The building of the thumbnails can take a few moments if you're working with a big document because the pages have to be rendered before they can be displayed.
Contents
Some PDF documents include a table of contents, but this is not automatically included in every document. If there is not one included you can not select it but if the author has included one you can select the desired page through this way.
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If the table of contents is opened the thumbnails will be hidden at the bottom. But if you click on the thumbnail button the thumbnails will be displayed again and the table of contents will be hidden in the background.
Zoom
It is possible to not only choose a given zoom percentage from the menu but also to directly type the desired resolution. At the moment, the zoom is fixed from 10% to a maximum of 400%, but normally this should be enough.
Additionally there are two other zoom modes. One is to show a whole page on the screen and the other to zoom so that the page is as big as the window is wide.
If you want to zoom to a defined area you can use the magnifier. After selecting the area it will be displayed it fit the window.
It is also possible to zoom in or out in steps if you are using a mouse wheel. After pressing the Ctrl key, you can zoom by rotating the mouse wheel.
Choosing a zoom area is only possible if you have chosen the magnifier, the other zoom methods are always available.
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Choose an Area
This is a very powerful feature. With it you can not only copy a part of the document as a picture but also to copy it as text to the clipboard and use it in other programs.
Additionally the text can be read out if you have the text-to-speech system installed and prepared.
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Unfortunately the copied text is not always usable. This is because text isn't saved as plain text in a PDF document so it is hard for a computer to find out which letters are from which word. So you may find there are spaces between the letters where normally whole words would be.
It is also not possible to extract words if they are inside pictures when the document was made (scanned pages and so on).
Search for Text
A useful function is the text search. This can be done by pressing Ctrl+F, but there is another easy way. You can type it inside the search form on the left side. This has the advantage that only pages in the thumbnails are shown if the word is in that page. Now you can easily see if the word you have searched for is included or not.
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Conclusion
As you can see KPDF has quite cool functionality that is easy and effective to handle. Naturally is it possible to print or save the displayed documents.
What is missing is the possibility to edit a document, but this is very hard to implement. However I'm sure they are working on this.
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