Gestures: a suggested setup I found useful (Quick n Dirty!)

[LivresInOz]

* Gestures make Koreader ALOT more enjoyable, I find

* But setting them up can be tricky**

* After hours of experimentation I came up with some gestures that worked well for things I tend to use frequently, and I expect others might too

* It's just a quick and dirty guide - I don't have time to write an 'ELI5'.

* Note: because of this I'm not always using the precise term that's in the settings - I'm sometimes using the 'layman's term' that most people would understand (Example: I say 'up/down toggle', whereas the settings say 'invert rotation').

* But it shouldn't take too much to find where these gestures are in the menus. The value provided here is WHICH to use. A quick clue:

How to get to the right place in settings:

Top menu > settings wheel symbol > Taps & Gestures > Gesture manager

GESTURES FOR: ALL VIEWS

ORIENTATION (for me a constant problem!)

Here I'll give you two choices:
1) A single swipe to just continually turn it around till you get to where you want
2) Two different swipes depending on whether you want to change the whole orientation (horizontal/vertical) or just flip the current one (up/down)

NOTE!: the gesture(s) folder view and reader view are set independently! (So if you want these orientation gestures to work in both views, you need to set them in both)

1) Single swipe until you get to the right one:
Short diagonal swipe (In settings look for 'Device > Rotate by 90 degrees CW')
I find this a bit easier because:
- you don't have to stop and think: "now what is my problem? Am I upside down or in the wrong orientation?". You just go by what you see
and
- single diagonal swipes are really easy and fast

OR


2) Two different gestures depending on the orientation problem:
Vertical/horizontal toggle: Two-finger swipe (ALL swipe directions are set to this, so I don't have to work out what direction!)
Up/down toggle: One-finger short diagonal swipe

So it's basically: two fingers to change the main orientation (ie. vertical/horizontal), one finger just to flip the current orientation

FOR: FOLDERS VIEW

History: swipe down left side
Favourites (favourite docs): swipe down right side
Folder Shortcuts (favourite folders): swipe up right side

File Search: spread or pinch (For now I've set both to find. But later I may assign one of these to something else).

FOR: READING VIEW (esp PDFs)

Skim book: long-press bottom right
Page browser: long-press bottom left

Crop (semi auto): pinch

Zoom to content + fit width: Spread
NOTES:
- This command is a great one-step way to make a PDF fairly viewable (if necessary combined with cropping above)
- It works best though with the garden variety single column PDF, not multiple columns (like big textbooks full of pics).
- You may need to wait a bit for 'spread' work, or try a couple of times
- Another way to set it up the above function seems to be simply: Zoom mode > content width
- These commands are all under 'Fixed layout documents'


Show full page: one tap top left (this is built in but I only discovered it accidentally and find it useful!)

Back to file browser: (i.e folder view) long-press top left

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These are default I think, but useful to know
(I found Koreader pretty confusing in regard to taps and swipes when I first used it. This is to provide clarification, esp for newbies!)

Top or bottom menu: swipe from top or bottom (best to tap in the middle)

Top menu: tap top middle
(NOTE: I think tapping the bottom by DEFAULT brings up the bottom menu, but in my case it brings up status bar, because I set it that way)

Status bar: tap bottom (my setting)

Turning page:
- tapping middle of page will turn it forward
- tap left or right to turn that way







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PROBLEM I'M INTERESTED IN HELP WITH MYSELF!:

I don't really want the pages to turn whenever I swipe or touch the general middle area of the page...because I do that alot accidentally because I'm used to other ebook readers. I tried to stop this from happening by going to settings > Taps and Gestures > Page Turns and then unchecking:
- 'With swipes'
- 'Tap zones: left/right' > top/bottom
but it didn't seem to do anything.

Be interested in any help on this...

I really only want the page to turn when I tap the left or right side.
MAYBE also when I touch the bottom or top, but I also understand that it might be good to reserve that area for calling up the menus.

For me this was the most frustrating thing when I first started using Koreader. It made me less interested in using it for a long time***. Since I so habitually touch or swipe the page, I was constantly turning pages without wanting to.

Since this whole exercise of exploring the gestures has made me more familiar with them, maybe that will help. But if I could turn OFF all page-turns with any kind of touch in the main part of the page...

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Obviously if anyone else has some nifty shortcuts they find easy to execute and that make sense for their function, I'd love to hear about them!







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FOOTNOTES

** Why tricky? Because:
- some gestures are easier to do properly than others
- some gestures are not very suitable for particular functions. A clear example is ORIENTATION: using a gesture that relies on a particular CORNER of the screen will soon get confusing!

*** Until I discovered the thing that (for me) Koreader is REALLY good at: you can use the bottom 'Fit|Zoom to|Direction' tab to set up any individual PDF to view settings that make it easy to view it's particular layout, and it will remember those settings for every page. This means that once you set it up, in many cases you can just navigate through the whole book by hitting the hardware buttons, without further adjustments. VERY COOL! This saves you having to zoom each page individually with your fingers, which is very time-consuming and fiddly if you are viewing a PDF in the standard Kobo interface.

[NiLuJe]

Originally Posted by LivresInOz

I tried to stop this from happening by going to settings > Taps and Gestures > Page Turns and then unchecking:
- 'With swipes'
- 'Tap zones: left/right' > top/bottom
but it didn't seem to do anything.

Disabling swipes should *definitely* disable swipe to turn, unless you have conflicting custom gestures. (Or if there's a bug. But I don't think there is, because I'm pretty sure that's how all my devices are set up, as swipes are the devil 's way to turn pages ;p.)

Neutralizing the center of the screen probably requires manually setting up custom tap zones, though.

(Spoiler alert: I've never used the new-ish tap zone preset stuff, and it's "old" enough that I don't rightly recall what presets it exposes. When in doubt, setup your tap rectangles by hand . IIRC, we covered that in the manual.).

[LivresInOz]

I am using two different swipes in the reading view:
- two-finger swipe in ANY direction is set to toggle orientation between horizontal and vertical
- one-finger short diagonal is set to flip the current orientation