Christiaan:

> it is not really feasible to make it resizable. I really would have
> made the dot more fuzzy (and therefore smaller looking), but the
> system really wants to put a shadow behind it, which makes it ugly
> when it is too fuzzy.

Ick.

> ’t’ to get out of out is not possible *(unless you first move
> ’the focus back to the PDF), because the various views eat up the
> ’single character key events.

That's too bad.

> > - How about 'h' and '?' for a help menu of the above toggles?
> > (including 'h' and '?' of course)
> 
> A bit circular, and I would not know what a help menu would look
> like. You can look them up in the Wiki.

Although it is self referential, many mauals do this.  It makes the
controls 100% clear.  No guessing by the user.

See my example below for how a help menu would look - just a set of
text, one line per command with short but complete descriptions.

> > - I thought it would be useful to have a way to go to the beginning
> > so I typed 'b' and it went black.  Oh!  It's a toggle!
> 
> That’s for screen blackout. 

Yes, I figured that out after the initial panic.  I can see that if
someone accidentally hit 'b' during a presentation they could get a
heart attack if they didn't know about the invisible magical controls.

> > - s for start (I would prefer 'b' but that's taken apparently)
> > - e for end
> 
> That’s just the standard shortcuts for beginning-of-document and 
> end-of-document (bound to FN key with arrows or page-up/-down, depending on 
> your keyboard layout).

Ah, ok.  Those are really hard to get to on my desktop and not at all
obvious on my laptop that I use for presentation.  So they are pretty
much hidden.  I would be guessing which FN keys to use every time.

> > - Likewise, by trying various characters I discovered that 'p' gives
> > the pages (?) in a row format - nice.  But the mouse pointer
> > disappears after moving around a little!  Looks like a bug! 
>
> This really is a bug in the system, it keeps hiding or unhiding the
> mouse when we tell it do the opposite. We already have a ton of
> workarounds to fight against the system, but it keeps finding new
> ways to mess with it.

Dang Apple!!  They try to be helpful and make things difficult. 
They've lost sight of simple.

> > Like 't'
> > this should be a toggle.  Just go back to the page I was on
> > previously, don't force me to select a page.
> 
> Same thing here, the view eats up the single character key events, so we 
> can’t bind it.

That's annoying.

> BTW, to get rid of some thing, the standard shortcut us Escape,
> which we implement in various places such as the pages Overview and
> the contents pane, as well as fullscreen and Presentation modes.

That's very dangerous because if I'm in the middle of a scientific
presentation and hit too many escapes by accident, I would get kicked
out!

> > A list so far for the help display (in alphabetic-ish order):
> > 
> > b - black screen (toggle)
> > e - jump to end of slides
> > h - help (this display, toggle)
> > l - laser = red circle for mouse pointer (lower case 'L') (toggle)
> > p - table of contents in rows over whole screen (toggle)
> > s - jump to start of slides
> > t - table of contents on left side (toggle)
> > ? - help (this display, toggle)
> > > - increase laser circle size  (could be '.' too)
> > < - decrease laser circle size  (could be ',' too)
> 
> Cf the Wiki

I see that one can get to the Wiki from Skim - thanks!

I searched that page for 'presentation' and found two irrelevant things.

Carsten said:

> I think Thomas and I come from the observation that starting to give
> a presentation can immediately halve one's IQ, and reduce one's
> ability to remember shortcuts by the factor of 10.

That's perhaps true, but if I don't know about some invisible magical
controls in the first place, I don't even know to go hunting for them!

> Many presentation tools have picked up the lesson and have an aid
> for those moments one feels^W is stupid, usually mapped to the
> “?” key.

Right.  Using '?' is a universally applicable easy guess for any
program.

The problem is that if I'm running Skim in presentation mode, it is
awkward to have to get to the wiki in a separate browser to find the
relevant controls - and I wasn't able to find a list of the invisible
magical controls when I looked at the wiki!

Again, thanks SO MUCH for this fabulous program!!

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Center for Cancer Research
  RNA Biology Laboratory
  Biological Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  [email protected]
  https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms


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