[Okular] Autoscroll with the middle mouse button

An option to have autoscroll like in Firefox (when it is enabled). Click with the middle mouse button anywhere on the document, a symbol like this is displayed:

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Move the mouse up or down, and the screen starts scrolling. The farther the mouse pointer is from the symbol, the faster the autoscroll: from really slow (a few pixels per second) to blazing fast (dozens of pages per second). Click again anywhere (either with middle or left button) to stop autoscrolling.

If instead of clicking with the middle mouse button, the user clicks and drags up or down, the same thing happens, only autoscroll is stopped when the middle mouse button is released.

It is flawlessly implemented in Firefox, including Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer, which is otherwise inferior to Okular in every way (in my opinion), apart from having his feature.

I would like this feature to be an option in the settings, disabled by default, so that current behaviour of middle click (zoom) is not affected for users who prefer it this way.

5 Likes

This sounds like a good feature! Please post it on bugs.kde.org so it can be tracked and hopefully added!

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Can you elaborate on this? In my experience, middle click is always used for pasting from the secondary clipboard.

From my understanding, middle-click to paste is standard on Linux while middle-click to scroll is more of a Windows thing.

Indeed; I’m just confused about the zoom part. I’ve never seen middle click to zoom.

Yeah that is weird, middle-click does not zoom for me in Okular and I don’t see an option to do so (nor does any of the tools enable you to middle-click to zoom).

Strange… I open a PDF file in Okular. I click and drag up or down with the middle mouse button and the page zooms in or out.

In fact, the mouse cursor briefly changes to this:
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…which is additionally confusing, since it does not scroll up or down, just zooms in or out. Then it changes back to:

image