Make progress meter more useful

[Lewis Rosenthal]

When searching a long document, the progress dialog displays a notification of activity, but other than counting through the pages, it does not display meaningful progress as a % of completion. It would be useful (when searching a 1,000+ page tome, for example) to have a progress meter. Searching again should pick up where the last search left off in terms of the progress meter, too. Thus, if we stop 50% of the way through the document at the first hit, Ctrl+G should display the bar at 50% when it starts searching for the next hit.

[Gregg Young]

What is the goal here? The simple way to write the meter is to use percent of pages scanned. This unfortunately may or may not relate to time since a page with 50 words take `1/2 the time to search as one with 100 and blanks take essential 0. So if the first half is all short pages and the second all long pages you are no where near 50% done by time when 50% of the pages have been scanned.

[Lewis Rosenthal]

Obviously, without taking a count of all of the possible hits first, and basing the % on that, we're not going to present anything more than a rough guess as to how far along we really are in terms of number of hits passed vs number of hits to go.

My thinking was just a simple page count meter, because seeing page numbers fly doesn't really give me a good visual representation. If I am expecting to hit the word "chuckle" somewhere soon in a 500-page document, and I am 50% into it, I know I should cancel the search (and ensure that I didn't mistype my criteria). Currently, about the best I can do is watch the hundreds count up, because the others fly by too rapidly.

This is definitely low on the list, but I wanted to note it while it was on my mind (because I did indeed mistype something while searching a 1,200-page document last night - LOL).