NB2 - Issues with single continuous page of material

[Philip Matern]

In NB1, the pages were converted over to maintain a page style format.  With NB2, it appears that everything is put into a single continuous page with no page breaks or indicators of pages.

I can see that a pure text reading assignment could be helped by continuous scrolling, and the fact that annotations are only available for text now suggests where you all are taking the design of NB (along the lines of perusall).  Personally, this is not helpful for how we use NB.  Moving through the pages now seems more confusing and cluttered.  At any given point, students might be viewing material across three different pages with no visual separation.  The old "pages" compartmentalized the material how it was intended to be contained and viewed with visual page breaks between pages.

Also, with the old pages style, it showed you where you were in the document (page number).  We could reference other pages/material and copy/paste the direct page links into discussions, which would let people jump right to that page elsewhere in the document.  Now there's no way to point someone to any area of material.  If the document is 40+ pages long, then they're just scrolling around not knowing where they are.  I'm guessing the way the files are now converted into these html like long continuous page means the direct png page links won't be an option?  Maybe it could be something like anchors?

Even so, I think the new NB2 at least needs visual page separators of some kind.  Also, it would be nice if there were some way to "click" through the pages where the top of the next page would jump to the top of the browser screen (maybe little forward and back arrows to advance through the document).  This combined with the visual separator would be really useful for students studying and reviewing documents.

Thanks!

[David Karger]

Philip, can you confirm that you are talking about pdf documents?  By their nature html documents don't have pages.
It should be a simple matter to maintain the page breaks in pdf documents; I can add it to the issue list if that's what's needed.

On the other hand, I'm not sure what you mean about direct linking to individual pages.   NB1 didn't have that functionality as far as I know.  It *is* possible to link to specific comments. 

[Philip Matern]

I am talking about PDFs.  NB1 looked like it just made a picture of each page that could be annotated.  I don't know how PDF files are processed in NB2, but they definitely aren't whole page images any more.  With the added ability to highlight text and without pagebreaks, it appears more like a continuous scrollable html page.  They may not actually be that way, but that's why I described it that way.  When loaded in NB2, the address bar for the file does say "nb_viewer.html?id=...".  Are the pdf's not being converted to html when uploaded?

NB1 files have a hyperlink "Page #" link at the top and bottom of each page (see image).  If you click that link, it loads the file and jumps to that specific page with the top border lined up at the top of the browser.  The address for each page adds "?p=#" to the file address (see image).  This essentially acts like a html anchor and jumps to that section/page of the file.  Watch this video clip showing how you can type any page number and it jumps right to it.  This was so handy in discussions.  You could say in a discussion on page 35, "remember on page 8 (hyperlinked)...." and everyone could go right to that source within the document.

NB2 does not process files this way.  There's obviously no page number labels/links, and I tried adding "?p=#" to the end of a file address and it doesn't work.  Side note: it comes back with this message (containing a typo: information) "This website doesn't seem to be part of any of your classes. Please make sure your enrolled to your class and using the correct URL. Contact your instructor for more informaiton." 

Also, I know that my students who used NB for studying really relied on page numbers.  They could make a note during class and be able to go directly back to that material.  NB2 could really benefit from at least labeling each page and having very clear page breaks (NB has visual gaps of a different color).  It would be amazing if NB2 could also jump directly to hyperlink specific pages within the file like NB1.  Not as essential, but someday, I'd love to see some way of advancing through the documents page by page rather than continuous scrolling (the up and down keyboard arrows currently scroll vertically, I'd love if the right and left arrows could somehow jump page by page).

[David Karger]

got it.  these are things we can add to our issue list.

for nb2, we are (just like the chrome browser does natively) using a popular library (pdf.js) to convert pdfs to html for display in the browser.  I am sure there are settings in the library to choose between "continuous scrollable image" and "pages"; we just need to find and hook them up.   We did it this way for people who were frustrated about not being able to select lines of text in a pdf document, but I recognize there are benefits to being able to select rectangles as well.   If you could select rectangles on images, but were still selecting text by lines/characters, would that be suitable for your usage?

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[Philip Matern]

• " If you could select rectangles on images, but were still selecting text by lines/characters, would that be suitable for your usage?"

Yes, definitely.  The highlighting text annotation is a great feature, but it definitely still needs image annotation for us to use it.  Our pages are image heavy with some text.  I start a new class at the end of September, and if it can annotate over image sections of the page by then I will likely start using NB2 (and hope for later updates to add page breaks, etc.).