Allow auto-reload of PDF file

[cfgnunes]

I am an avid user of the pdfarranger, which I primarily use as a multi-page PDF viewer.

Feature Request

I would like to request the addition of an auto-reload feature in pdfarranger, similar to the functionality currently available in recent versions of Evince. This feature would automatically refresh and display the latest version of the PDF document when changes have been made to it.

Use Case

As a LaTeX user, I frequently produce and update PDF documents. Each time I generate a new version of a PDF, it is important for me to immediately see the updated content on the screen without having to manually reload the file.

Implementation

I imagine this feature could potentially be implemented with a file-watcher mechanism that detects changes to the PDF file in disk and triggers a refresh in the pdfarranger viewer.

Benefit

This feature would greatly streamline the workflow for users like myself who frequently work with updated PDF documents, saving us the time and effort of manually reloading the file after every change.

I believe this addition would significantly enhance the usability of pdfarranger, and I am not alone in this. I have spoken with several colleagues who expressed a desire for this feature as well.

Thank you very much for considering this request. I truly appreciate the work that you and your team do on pdfarranger and am excited about the potential for this feature to further improve the software.

Best regards,

[kbengs]

I think this request has been up once before, but I could not find it now.

I see that this would be a useful feature but I am afraid there are cases when this will be problematic. Such case could be if number of pages change in the pdf.

If no one else look into this I might try it later and see what issues are run into.

[cfgnunes]

@kbengs

Thank you for your response and for considering the auto-reload feature request for pdfarranger. I understand the complexities involved, especially in scenarios where the number of pages in the PDF might change.

Looking forward to future developments in pdfarranger, and once again, thank you for all the work you do.

Warm regards,

[m-holger]

I cannot see how this could work safely and efficiently. While it is true that evince automatically reloads the input file, it seems that it looses any new annotations created in evince in the process. Okular has a similar feature. It will automatically reload the file if it has not been edited by okular or otherwise give the user the choice whether to reload (and loose the modifications) or not.

[dreua]

I think this request has been up once before, but I could not find it now.

#407 wanted a button for it ;)

[m-holger]

#407 mentions the use case of editing / assembling a pdf file with pdfarranger and annotating it at the same time, which happens to be how I most frequently use pdfarranger.

For this use case I do not think that the solution is to provide a facility to reload the source file in pdfarranger. To me it would make much more sense to provide a facility to open a specific pdfarranger page in a viewer that allows annotating the page, and afterwards, conceptionally, to use the edited pages instead of the original.

(From an implementation point of view, it probably should be the annotations rather than the whole page that is imported back into pdfarranger, and the issues around link annotations would need to be considered)

[kbengs]

Here are some ideas about it:
kbengs@b347bbe

Not much tested and not sure whether I like it.