Suggestion: Selecting a tab from a setlist

[SuperSalmiakki]

I've been looking for a simple PDF Viewer that I could use on a Windows laptop with touch interface (portrait mode) during a musical performance to view the lyrics and Sumatra has worked pretty well (I like the fact that it remembers the zooming and last position of the viewed PDF). However, to make it better for at least that usage case, I am suggesting a couple of ideas for improvement.
The problem: When you have a set of song lyrics that is above a certain number (>8 or so) selecting the next song from the tab bar is nearly impossible (you accidentally hit the X and close the page) to navigate and select the song lyrics.
Solutions (Full Screen mode - best for viewing lyrics, whole screen is available): One way would be to pick a hot corner (user selectable?) that you could touch, and the UI would turn into a list of open tabs. Select the tab to move to by touching it. Fairly simple and I would think not hard to implement. Another way might be to treat each tab as a page, and you could move from one tab to another by swiping left/right (two fingers or tapping on a special area with your finger). There could be other (better) ways, but these come to my mind.
Related to this, as an extra cool feature, Sumatra could offer a way for the user to collect all songs in tabs (with proper placing and zooming for best visibility) and then save the whole set of tabs as a set-list that you could open and replace the currently opened tabs. Thus, the user could have multiple setlists ready to go and pick one and off you go!
Sumatra could also become a go to PDF viewer for lyrics if done right. It already is pretty good for a small number of tabs.

[GitHubRulesOK]

Ok most of that should be possible one way or another in current pre-release
however touch is not as versatile as programable pedal or foot keyboard.

Lets see there are several requests so I will start with the last to gather a collection of tabs need them to be set as required for store and open as a set list.

I have 8 tabs open full screen and a keyboard to save them from a preset personal command "another app all current tabs" call it what you want I dont need the menu as you can see I chose to use the b key for initiation.

I will spare you the full details but it runs an external script so starts like this

and the result is another CMD file as seen here
which can be ANY contents but importantly for you has all the current tabbed files as a list for any app (including SumatraPDF) to run at once.

So it is best to use a keyboard for saving pre-set sessions that can be run as a COMMAND selection of sets of any name and any number of files. To open fullscreen would need a tweak of that cmd file to include -fullscreen before the first filename.

[SuperSalmiakki]

Interesting! Creating and saving "setlist" or "sessions" by using a keyboard & mouse would be just fine. Setting up a song/lyrics list is anyways a separate action that you do beforehand. When performing, opening a session (a set of tabs with lyrics) in full screen mode and no keyboard (only touch available) should then open the PDFs as they were optimally setup for full screen viewing.

[GitHubRulesOK]

For other requests the use of tabbing has been significantly improved over the past week or so and can be used many ways to slide from one tab to the next via a single selectable key. so you need to look at pre-release for that too. and internal tab list is also improved. so that CTRL K can be assigned to a key also?

[GitHubRulesOK]

@SuperSalmiakki

OK thinking about your method/set-up I should perhaps have suggested a different starting point.

TABS are only retained by saving the whole settings.txt file at a given point in time. Thus my suggestion to save file states may not work as per your desire to save a session of "tabs". for that to work well you need to close session and save the settings text for future use, HOWEVER there can only be ONE settings file.

To start with different settings.TXT there is only one switch -appdata which expects a "folder" name thus needs different starting folders with or without other files ! then you startup sequence would need to point to the different start folder.
sumatrapdf.exe -appdata c:\mydata\weddings where weddings folder has its own sumatrapdf-settings.txt

[SuperSalmiakki]

Thanks for the info! Just to clarify: At least in my case, each PDF is only one page (don't have time or possibility to scroll while performing) that is position and zoom so that there is no unnecessary white space around (max zoom without losing any of the content) => Each tab is a one-page PDF positioned & zoomed correctly.
What you say about the settings file makes sense and I thought of copying and saving a session of tabs by copying the settings.txt file for later use (settings file for various song lists). You could then copy and replace the current settings file with the one you need. I guess another way would be to separate the app settings info (sumatra.ini) from the PDF setting info (pdf-settings.txt). PDF settings could then have the latest positioning & zoom settings for all PDFs that you have opened. The ini file can have the names of the last opened tabs or there could be a separate "session.txt" file to denote that. Anyways, that would require a fair amount of work so just ignore me.

[GitHubRulesOK]

it WAS (is?) possible to start sumatrapdf with a batch built limited settings file and sumatrapdf start by filling in the defaults HOWEVER that also has several challenges, so not a reasonable working solution for this case.

If you have pre-set settings.txt then your idea of copy over the "saved session" for each different launching is probably the simplest to manage. For minor adjustments you simply edit or resave each session so for example a cmd or shortcut icon file that simply does copy c:\data\weddings.txt c:\path\folder\sumatrapdf-settings.txt & sumatrapdf.exe

[Ronald-G-Andrade]

Hello, thanks for this new feature, it's really nice. But please, is there any way it can be disabled?? Because I tend to compare two PDFs by pressing Tab key many times, while I keep pressing Ctrl key, but this is not possible with this new “Tab Search” menu. Thank you.

[GitHubRulesOK]

@Ronald-G-Andrade wrong thread This one is about saving tabs. However the tab right left function was shifted from tabs to page "Same as browsers" so CTRL + page UP/DOWN
For 2 tabs set one icon to go tab right and it will cycle 1 > 2 > 1 > 2

[GitHubRulesOK]

My touch tablet is very old and is only 180 :-)
however it has lots of bells and whistles like OSKD or is it OCD abilities but I would need to move task bars to top or bottom to run extra commands and maximise screen usage for reading.