PDF search results are hard to see
When searching for words and phrases in PDFs, the results are very hard to notice on the screen! Sometimes I have the page quite zoomed out, and in this case today I have 2-page spreads, so the words are quite small. The found-text highlight colour is a very pale blue, and is only as big as the word.
I would like to see, and so suggest, something along these lines:
- a brighter result highlight, more vibrant and contrasting than pale blue (this could be customisable & maybe themable too)
- a border around the result, or at least an oversized highlighted region
- an eye-catching animation to draw your vision towards the search result, such as a pulse in scale, or a large box fading in and shrinking to wrap around the result.
This is very simple to reproduce to check what I am saying, if you haven't already noticed this! Just open a document with many pages and columns and images, zoom out and choose one of the page spread options, and then Ctrl+F search for a word.
Thank you for reading, I hope this can be relayed to the right people!
Athraithe ag Farran ar
All Replies (2)
the browser is a simple pdf reader not a search tool as such. So where are you searching the pdf at?
Hi Farran, I didn't realize you could view two pages of a PDF side-by-side in Firefox's viewer. I eventually worked out that setting the scaling to Page Fit and using the "Wrapped Scrolling" setting on the menu will do it. (Example screenshot attached.)
Yes, the text is small!
The PDF Viewer uses Firefox's standard Find feature. When I use Find, I generally use the Highlight All button. If you try that, does it help at all?
Unfortunately, the built-in PDF viewer is considered a part of the browser, so extensions are not allowed to manipulate the content of pages in the viewer or modify how selections appear. You might need to use a different viewer if you are not able to spring for a larger screen.
Regarding future changes:
Suggestions tend to get lost here, but there are many places to submit new ideas depending on what kind of interaction style you like.
Discussion Sites/Advocacy
- Mozilla Discourse: https://discourse.mozilla.org/
- If none of the categories seem to fit, try https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/firefox-development
- Reddit (monitored by Mozilla): https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/
- I saw someone created a Change.org petition but I don't know who sees those
Limited Length Comments
- Feedback site: https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/
- Twitter (Mozilla official): https://twitter.com/firefox
Bug Tracking System
- Unfortunately, new feature requests tend to get a low priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
- See: Bugzilla Etiquette