[Feature Suggestion] Preview Page

[J4PC]

Have you ever lost orientation inside your book?
Especially when making animations or inserting and removing pages, it can happen a lot.
So it would help a ton if there were some kind of preview when editing, to see which page would be next and which one came before.

I know this is a bit of an “out there” suggestion because it looks different from vanilla when editing. That’s why I would also suggest that it wouldn’t be on by default. Instead, to activate it, there could be a toggle below the color palette to quickly turn it on and off at will. But I can also understand if this feels too different from what you had in mind with the mod.

Anyways, I made a quick mockup to showcase the potential.

[chrrs]

That's actually a really cool idea!

[J4PC]

That's actually a really cool idea!

@chrrs Unrelated — in case you haven’t seen it, I sent you a message on CurseForge.

[chrrs]

I've thought about this a bit more while working on #96, I decided not to do this. It's a very specific feature that probably won't be used much by a lot of people, and I don't want to bloat Scribble too much with one-off features. Sorry!

[J4PC]

It totally agree with you that the feature isn't for everyone, and its not vanilla but with the the double page page layout now in beta I can't seem to unsee the benefits of also offering this page layout.

I think this feature is for the bit more advanced user, and I personally know a couple of people that were excited about the possibility of preview the the before and after page for better orientation in a book. Because when editing a book the only thing that indicates where you are relative to the rest of the pages is the page number this makes it difficult to orient because you don't always know what's behind a given number and just insert one page or switch the order of something makes it even more disorienting.

I can also understand that you don't want to bloat Scribble with too many features but I believe this one is worthwhile, for example the overflow #57 is a mild convenience. The preview page might also seem inconceivable but actually can make a lot of difference for a bit more complex book project eg. Animations, Page reordering, and longer books.

So I maybe it is possible to make the page layout option an enum with

• Vanilla
• Double page
• Preview adjacent

And maybe maybe if I could wish you could set the page layout for editing and viewing a signed book separately. So you can edit in double page or preview adjacent, but view the result like the people without the mod would see.

What you opinion @chrrs on this and how difficult do you think the feature would be to implement compared to the double page viewing?

[chrrs]

It's not necessarily that it's hard to implement (actually, here's an early implementation i made a while ago in 10 minutes to try it out), it's more that I don't want to overwhelm people (and me) with a bunch of options that have a specific use case, and that most people most likely won't have any use of. Not that this specific feature would push it over that edge, but that would already be the case if I added every single suggestion I get. I'd rather have a small-ish set of ideas that really work well together (ex. double page view, which I made sure works as expected with every single other feature) than for Scribble to be a bowl of features loosely thrown together.

Those things aside, it would probably be a separate option from double page viewing, since this could also just show to the sides of two pages no problem. I do see the benefits of this for sure, I stand by my original message, I still think this is a really cool idea!

I'll reopen this to reconsider, I'll need to decide if/how to fit this into Scribble in a nice way. Maybe it's not that big of a deal and I'm just overthinking it :P

[TolleTafel]

I also wanted to express my excitement for the page preview feature.

I see your point that most people most likely won't use it. Most people just leave the standard settings alone and will never experience this feature. But it still would be incredibly helpful for maintaining context while editing, especially for longer books with complex layouts or animations.
In my opinion, the argument of the user base also applies to the double page view. I think it compromises the format of existing books that were created with a single page in mind and thus would not turn it on.

I just wanted to show my stance that, contrary to you, I'm a bigger fan of the page preview and see the double page view as bloat.

The optional toggle approach seems perfect - those who work on more complex projects can benefit from the added context, while everyone else is not bothered.
And the same applies for the double page view - those who want a more vanilla experience can keep the double page off and others who want more space on their pages, as well as a more "realistic" book feel can turn it on.

To summarize i would say, that both are a great addition to Scribble, just for different audiences. But both have a audience.