Using the viewer with Carbon design package

Since IBM Daeja ViewONE V5.0.7, the IBM Carbon design package is available and makes the user interface more consistent, intuitive, and provides a more cohesive user experience. In later versions Carbon design package is updated.

The Carbon design package offers a standardization of the color scheme and style, and usability enhancements such as:

  • A new, simplified layout across annotation and redaction toolbar, main menus, thumbnails pane, and document builder mode.
  • Grouped features in the toolbar, such as annotation types, to improve usability and performance.
  • A revised interface with fewer functions, placed in the appropriate context. Functions that do not apply to the current view are unavailable or removed.
  • Disabling the relevant buttons in the north toolbar when no document is open.
  • Viewer tabbing out to other browser elements once the tabbing sequence is exhausted. The page selection field is no longer included in the tabbing sequence, but can still be accessed by pressing 'g'.
  • Disabling the View Attachments button when there is no document loaded.
  • Disabling the Zoom in and Zoom out buttons on the south toolbar when the magnifier is in use.

The Classic design package remains available. You can use the designPackage HTML parameter to toggle between the two designs.

Using the viewer with the Carbon design package provides improvements in the following areas.

Viewing documents

You can switch between the following views with the viewMode HTML parameter:
View Description
Page View Displays the full page.
Thumbnails View Displays thumbnails only.
Page and Thumbnails View Displays page and thumbnails, which are positioned according to the configuration set by the viewMode parameter.

By default the thumbnails pane is displayed on the left, and the end-user cannot modify the thumbnails position on the screen.

To set a different position, see the viewMode parameter.

Image shows the viewer with the Carbon design package

Customization

Annotations
The annotation types that are available within the Annotation toolbar are grouped in sets, for a simplified viewing experience. Each set has a primary annotation type in the toolbar, and you can click an annotation group twice to see all types in this group. When you select a different type, it is promoted to the toolbar for that viewer session. You can still use the annotationHideButtons parameter to hide annotation types that you do not need. If all annotation types are hidden within a certain group, except for one, this type becomes the single primary annotation type in the toolbar.

Predefined sets of grouped annotations are available by default, but you can deactivate this setting and revert to a flat list of annotations with the groupAnnotationsInToolbar parameter. You can set the position of the annotation toolbar with the annToolbarMode parameter.

The following annotation types are no longer available with the Carbon design package:
  • Angle
  • Ruler
  • Transparent Highlight
If you have documents with these annotation types applied in a previous product version, the annotations are still displayed and you can edit them, but the edit options are limited to moving and deleting the annotation.
Viewer layout
you can customize the viewer appearance further and expose only the features that you need. You can choose to include only a set of basic viewing features for a simplified experience, through settings that control the visibility of the different action toolbars. For example, you can hide the Search and Index buttons in the Thumbnails action toolbar with the thumbsActionsHideButton parameter.

you can turn off some advanced features that might not be necessary for your usage, such as searching text within PDFs, image enhancement options, or the overflow menu that includes more information about the document and the viewer configuration.

Presentation
  • The visibility of the north toolbar is controlled by the parameter showNorthToolbar which can take the value true or false. The default value is true.
  • HTML parameter pageButtons is not supported in Carbon UI.
  • When HTML parameter allButtons is set to false, the south toolbar is now also hidden.

Saving documents

You can download specific pages of a document from the viewer:

    1. Click the Download Document button Download button.
    2. In the dialog box that appear, specify whether you need to download specific pages of the document or the entire document.

  • Screenshot showing the Document Download dialog bx

    Here select:

    • Document -To download entire document with original mime type.
    • Page -To specify the pages to be downloaded in the PDF format.
    Note: If you constructed the document in the viewer from different source documents with the page<n> parameter, then the viewer constructs this file as a PDF.

Usability

Context-relevant functions

Functions are removed when they are not applicable in a selected view, for example page-specific actions are not available in the south toolbar when in Thumbnails view, or they are visible only in the relevant context. In V5.0.9, the option for attachments is visible only when an email is visible with open attachments.

Simplified user actions

User actions are made more straightforward, and some features are grouped for an experience that is more closely aligned with industry standards. For example, circle and rectangle annotations are grouped within the rectangle annotation. To add a square annotation, draw a rectangle while holding the Shift key, which applies a square aspect ratio. The same applies to circles and ovals.

available actions are relevant to the view that you enable, for example for the zoom functions:
  • When the Page and thumbnails view is visible, left-click the zoom buttons to zoom in or out of the main page, and right-click the buttons to zoom in or out of the thumbnail.
  • When Page view or Thumbnails view are visible, zoom options apply to the element that you can see on screen.
User interface responsiveness
Tooltips are more responsive and adjust to the viewer size by wrapping and shifting to remain visible. You can also drag dialogs within the browser window to keep working without obstructing content.
Usability enhancements
  • The zoom area tool is no longer sticky. After a zoom area is applied, the zoom area button is deselected.
  • Dialogs with OK and cancel buttons are now draggable. The dialogs can no longer be dragged outside of the browser window.
  • The draggable area (used to move dialogs) at the top of moveable dialogs has been enlarged.
  • The Color Picker dialog is now moveable allowing users to place in where it doesn’t cover critical information.
  • Holding the Shift key whilst drawing a filled rectangle or highlight rectangle will now force a square aspect ratio.

Page edition

More enhancements are available depending on the viewer mode.

Document builder mode
The Carbon design package offers a modern user interface with improved interactions in document builder mode:
  • You can drag pages from a document in one viewer into an empty document in another viewer.
  • You can select a single or multiple pages within the Thumbnails pane, and drag those pages to a new position within the same or different document.
  • You can manipulate pages only when thumbnails are displayed, which gives you a global view of the page layout and the impact of your editions on the pages.
  • If a document is displayed in Page view (full page), page edit actions such as Copy, Cut, and Paste are not available. Keyboard shortcuts for these actions are not available either.
  • you can enable a button to close the Thumbnails pane in the Thumbnails toolbar.
  • you can make permanent modifications to the structure of the document such as correcting the page order or orientation.
Annotation and redaction modes
you can select multiple pages to rotate them, a feature that was previously available only in document builder mode. You can use standard shortcuts to select pages:
  • Hold CTRL and select pages in a non-sequential order.
  • Hold Shift and select a range of pages.
  • Select Ctrl + A to select all pages.
When multiple pages are selected, Invert, Visual effects, and Enhance actions are not available.
Page edition updates
  • It is now possible to drag and drop pages from a document in one viewer into an empty document in another viewer.
  • If the viewer is configured to start in Document Builder mode with no document opened, the viewer now displays the correct view after setView and openFile API methods are called.
  • Added a close button to the thumbs panel toolbar when the viewer is in Document Builder mode. This button closes the thumbs panel.
  • When loading the viewer in Document Builder mode with HTML parameter allButtons set to true, the Build button is now shown, whereas the Print and Invert buttons are no longer visible.

Globalization

Popup menus are now correctly aligned according to script direction of the language.

Consistency improvement

the following consistency are improved:
  • A limited color picker is displayed for PDF documents when the HTML parameter burnPDFtoPDF is set to true. This limited color picker only displays 8 main colors to match the PDF output of the burned version.
  • The transparent color option in the color picker has been removed for the text annotations and sticky note annotations.
  • The color fill option has been removed from the transparent text annotation edit toolbar.
  • The thumbnail size of the current page no longer increases when adding annotations on a rotated page.
  • When the annotation toolbar mode is set to left, then the search panel will appear on the right side when search button is clicked. The search panel was not appearing prior to this fix.
  • Right click to select non-grouped annotations or stamp annotations makes them sticky. Fixed so that annotations are not sticky unless annotationsSticky parameter is true.
  • The thumbs left and thumbs right shortcut keys (F5 and F7) are now disabled for the respective side of the annotation toolbar.
  • Replace Save with Update in the textEntry box when editing text annotations.
  • Change the Save button on the annotations edit toolbar to an 'accept' check mark icon.
  • When selecting hide annotations from the north toolbar and a sticky annotation is active, the annotation would still be active when selecting show annotations. This has now been changed so that all active annotation are selected when hiding annotations.
  • When the allbuttons parameter is false, it takes priority over other buttons settings. The buttons made available from setting filebuttonsave to true, initialeditmode to redact or docbuilder and editmodetoggle set to annotate, redact, or docbuilder are also hidden.
  • The view attachments icon no longer appears erroneously when a document with no attachments is open. This error would only occur when the HTML parameter allButtons is set to true.
  • After the viewer is started, if the setView method is called followed by the openFile method, the view is not changed to the value set by the setView API call. This is now fixed.
Manage notifications such that they are closed when the document is closed, and only one notification is shown at a time.