Re: gpdf [Was: 2.3 Proposed Features]

[Martin Kretzschmar <m_kretzschmar gmx net>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Okay, I've tried it out, and yeah, it's quite a bit nicer (UI-wise, and it
> seems, speed-wise) than ggv. A few comments/suggestions:
> 
>   * toolbar items are hidden rather than disabled when a document is not
>     loaded, would be a bit clearer if this was not the case

Not hidden. They are not even there. Bonobo-wise, the invisible  toolbar
items belong to the control which is created when the document gets
loaded. But these are implementation details, I'm sure that disabled
toolbar items can be shown when no document is loaded. Note that eog,
too, has zoom buttons only when an image is loaded.

>   * no indication of which page you're on, and how many there are... Apple's
>     "Preview" PDF browser has a page number toolbar entry box (which lets
>     you see the current page, and type a page number in to change),

I really missed that when I recently started to eat my own dogfood
again. I'm learning/playing a bit with bonobo-ui and this text box will
be there RSN.

>     and has
>     a scrollbar to indicate how far through the document you are (gpdf has a
>     scrollbar only for the current page, don't know how hard it would be to
>     change that, or if it's worth it... cool that you can scroll through an
>     entire document though)

I miss this feature a bit less, but I'd like to have it. So I'll play
with gtk/gnome-canvas, too.

>   * maybe a closed-by-default thumbnail sidebar would be good, to thumb
>     through pages interactively? don't want to fatten gpdf up too much, but
>     this might be worth it

Especially since some pdf files contain prerendered thumbnails.

>   * doesn't support the recent-files infrastructure from libegg, this is
>     gaining popularity in the Desktop apps (see the excellent recent-files
>     toolbar drop-down in gedit for a great way of doing this, as well as
>     the traditional list in the File menu)
>
>   * there's no smaller 'Fit Width' icon for the View menu

I put these on my todo list.

>   * gnome-vfs support with an 'Open Location...' item in the File menu would
>     be el-neat-o

Yet another lib to play with :-) Probably straight-forward. When porting
gpdf to GNOME 2 I just put in enough of gnome-vfs to make the File->Open
work.

>   * thank you for not putting tabs for multiple documents in there, and for
>     implementing drag and drop :-)

Hehe. I noticed that e.g. ggv and eog behave differently when closing
the last window showing a document. Eog just quits, ggv goes back to
no-document-loaded state. What's preferred in GNOME, HIG-wise? 

>   * doesn't add mime stuff, so you can't use it directly from Nautilus on
>     install, no entry for it in the 'Other Applications...' dialogue

More GNOME learning.

>   * for some reason (and this is the only genuine bug!), my PDFs are
>     displayed in the '!Y2KBUG' font. It's the first font on my system
>     (alphabetically), thanks to the '!'. Does xpdf not use embedded fonts?

Xpdf does. But GPdf uses gnome-print for PDF rendering. Gnome-print
doesn't support font-embedding yet. (In December I had a hack which
played bad tricks with gnome-print internals. Embedded Type 1 fonts
looked nice with that code, but being a hack, it quickly suffered
bit-rot and doesn't work with the released gnome-print 2.2). 

>     If not, it ought to default to the system fonts (and perhaps even the
>     system aliases for serif, sans-serif, monotype, etc).

I'll make it use the aliases first as I can easily get them from
gnome-print.

> All of my PDFs looked great in gpdf (apart from the font), and the user
> interface "just works"! :-) 

And I thought I hadn't put in any ui love.

> Thanks, this is top stuff!

Thanks
	Martin