[Feature Request] Make a PDF's TOC available to navigate large PDFs

[lindenstruth]

First of all, thanks a lot for this fantastic app! I'm using it on all my devices (iPhone, iPad, and Mac) nearly every day.

But since I'm mostly reading PDFs there are several features I'm sorely missing, first and foremost the possibility of showing a PDF's TOC (should it have one) in order to be able to navigate quickly within large PDF books/documents. Take for example a book such as this one (it has 1147 pages):

https://openstax.org/details/books/astronomy-2e/

It's almost impossible to just read specific chapters and jump between them if you don't want to read the whole book.

Somewhat related to this is the need for better keyboard control on macOS, which has already been requested in a separate issue #717

[everpcpc]

Hi @lindenstruth,

Thanks for the feature request! Actually, KMReader already supports PDF TOC navigation, but you need to make the PDF offline first to see this feature.

The TOC functionality is implemented locally - KMReader needs to download the complete PDF file to parse and extract the table of contents. This is because Komga itself doesn't provide TOC support in its API, so we have to handle it on the client side.

To use TOC navigation:

1. Open a PDF in KMReader
2. Tap the "Make Offline" button to download the complete file
3. Once downloaded, the TOC should become available in the navigation

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any issues with this workflow.

[lindenstruth]

Aaah now I've found it! Sorry for that, must've been blind 🫣 Thanks for the super fast response

[lindenstruth]

Could it be that the three-dots-button in the upper right corner isn't being shown on macOS (Version 15.7.5 Sequoia) at all? That could be the reason why I didn't spot it right away, considering I've started using KMReader on macOS...

[everpcpc]

Thanks for the feedback! Actually, there used to be a three-dot menu button for the TOC feature in earlier versions. However, I removed it because the interaction felt quite awkward - having to click a small button with the mouse to access navigation features didn't provide a good user experience.

[lindenstruth]

But this also removes the search as well as the go-to-page feature, which are both just as important when reading large PDF documents/books. Which often have internal links to other sections of the book.

So it would really be nice if you could consider the following options (not necessarily all of them):

• adding a PDF Reader settings option to show/hide this button, since it contains a lot of important UI elements (simple but effective, yet somewhat odd since it only applies to macOS)
• adding the most important entries, such as the TOC, search, and goto, to the main menu. This way they're available irrespective of whether the button is being shown (considering the "Reader" menu already exists but is completely empty)
• maybe adding a few keyboard shortcuts to avoid the mouse/trackpad interaction (easy when having the main menu items around)

The current user experience when reading large PDFs is imho lot worse I would say, it needlessly removes a lot of existing value from the app.

[everpcpc]

You're absolutely right about the macOS PDF reader menu bar issue - there are indeed missing menu bar buttons that should be there. This has been fixed in the latest TestFlight build and will be included in the next release.

Regarding keyboard shortcuts, the macOS PDF reader should have keyboard shortcut support, but it seems like that got missed in the current implementation. I'll add proper keyboard shortcuts for PDF navigation in a future update.

Thanks for pointing these issues out!