Re: Evince as universal "Viewer"

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

I've said no to this stuff several times already.  Like Jonathan said I
think Evince can do a great job viewing vector based documents, however
I think it will be a bad idea to use it as a viewer for these other
documents.

Creating viewer/editor combo applications means that people have to
figure out which application to open a document with and switch apps to
view/edit the document.  (for some reason this makes me think we're
creating a VI edit/view mode for our office apps)  

You end up with a desktop that opens .doc's for "Viewing" by default and
then you have to figure out a way to get to the editor.  Yes, we could
supply a [Edit] button from Evince to opens up the registered editor but
that isn't a solution, it's a hack for getting fast reading.  What if
the situation were that someone wanted to "quickly edit" the document?
We just failed.

There are a couple things about Evince that make it seem like a really
great choice for doing this.  For each of these reasons the Office
applications should look into taking advantage of this instead of Evince
handling their document types.

The number one reason people give is that Evince is fast and Abiword or
OOo or [insert office app here] is slow when you just want to read a
document.  The best fix for this is for those other applications should
be profiled to decrease their open and file load speed.  Evince has some
awesome profiling support that has been built into it which helps us out
a lot.  I'm sure the other apps have something like this, if not they
should.

If "Just reading" is a user interaction that people think Evince does
well with docs and those office applications want to support, they
should look into doing something like that.  A similar presentation mode
maybe?

Also, Evince has a great document find system that it shares with
Epiphany's find plugin.  Other document editors out there might benefit
from using this same find toolbar.  I'm sure they'll have to add things
like replace and what not, but GEdit is working on this right now.

Evince does nice Thumbnailing of pages to give quick overview of a
document and visual based page navigation.  There's no reason an Office
app could do the same.

We have a cool entry completion [1] from the Page Entry area that could
definitely be done by an document based office application.  

Anyway, I didn't want to drag out this thread except to say that Evince
is designed to make a persons interaction of navigating and reading a
document slick and easy.  Office applications should be doing the same
thing + editing made slick and easy ;-)

Cheers,
~ Bryan

P.S. I think the ourselves and GOffice people should all be working
together on this kind of stuff.  Evince and Epiphany are hand in hand
sharing design ideas and code, join the fun!

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172453

On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 10:42 -0700, Alan wrote:
> I'd like to see evince add functionality not for images (which as others
> have said have different needs than documents), but for other doc types.
> It'd be great to view .doc, .swx, .pdf, .abiword, etc documents all able
> to be viewed from one application.  Having a nice similar thumbnail,
> bookmark, system for all docs would be great.  Of course, it's also nice
> to have it *fast*.  The big thing about the preview app on os/x is that
> it's lightning fast :)