PDF viewer - "Document Outline" double clicking functionality to collapse all items on initial document outline gone after recent update

[shark115]

After the recent update, the functionality to collapse all document outlines and sub-outlines after double clicking the "Document Outline" button is gone for the PDF viewer. It used to be available before the recent UI update, and I (among many others) would like to have this functionality back. In my humble opinion, no UI update should be getting rid of any useful feature because that is often indicative of misplaced priorities for the team (or management thereof) behind the development of any app or product.

[saatom]

I am also quite annoyed by the removal of this feature but, as a workaround, I am able to toggle all outline items by shift+clicking one of the carats to the left of an outline item. I hope they add the ability to do this by double clicking the "find current outline item" button again but this is good enough for now.

[level2janitor]

i used this feature regularly and it's upsetting for it to be gone. please put it back!

[rcasey]

Hello, thanks for the feedback. As a member of the PDF team we take it seriously and are working hard on making a great PDF viewer. On that note, we've updated the viewer to allow this functionality. If you navigate to the outline in the sidebar, double-clicking the title Document outline you can toggle open/collapse the document outline. This functionality is currently available in Nightly.
We plan on working on improvements to this in the future. 
I'd like to include you all on future discussions, and even possible testing of improvements in the future. If you'd like to participate, let me know in this thread. 
And if it's not too much, I'd like to better understand how you're using the doc outline/pdf viewer;

1. What task or tasks are accomplished better by toggling the outline open/closed? Is it just to navigate? Or are there other scenarios where the outline is critical?
2. What do you use the PDF viewer for? Research, school? other? 
3. Do you use any other tools, such as comments or highlighting?

Lettings us know these answers can help the team better understand your needs.
Thanks
Ryan

[saatom]

I can't speak for anyone else in this thread but I primarily use the outline feature when sifting through reference material such as a textbook. I am an engineering student so I often need to reference tables and charts which are usually buried in textbook appendices that span dozens of pages. Being able to view the table titles at a glance without excessive scrolling allows me to jump right to the table I want. The same thing applies to the chapters themselves, where I can jump to specific chapters and topics easily in the outline view without having to scroll through hundreds of pages.

I rarely use the highlighting or comment features but when I do use them, I think Firefox's implementation is pretty solid. I just wish that it would save your size and color settings for things like the text tool between sessions (i.e. any time I go to comment on a document, I want it to default to whatever stroke width and color I used last). 

[rcasey]

Great, thanks for sharing! This is really helpful. And noted on the saving tool preferences.

[shark115]

Thank you for your response. I haven't used the Firefox nightly version just yet, I simply installed the ESR version of Firefox because of how disruptive this update was to my workflow. I mainly use the PDF reader for textbooks, and the document outline functionality as well as the ability to collapse document outlines is very useful for navigating textbooks/research articles with several nested headings. Thank you for taking this feature into consideration and I will be looking forward to it in future updates.

P.S. As far as using other tools go, such as drawing, commenting, or highlighting, I occasionally use them, but not as frequently as the document outline feature.

[rcasey]

Thanks for replying. And heard/understood about disrupting your workflow, it's definetly not our intention. Know your feedback is really valuable for us, and I appreciate the additional detail. We're steadily working on this and other features + improvements. If you want, and have time to test things, I would just need a signed NDA - but Id be happy to share WIP and get feedback.
Thanks for using Firefox and the PDF viewer!