Re: Evince as universal "Viewer"

[Paul Coates <Paul Coates ncl ac uk>]

On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 13:43 -0400, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Steven Garrity <stevelist silverorange com> writes:
> 
> > Someone mentioned Evince in the discussion and it made me wonder:
> > should Evince replace Eye of Gnome as the universal "Viewer" app on
> > Gnome. It already seems to support the basic image formats (jpeg, png,
> > etc.).
> 
> No.
> 
> The two are fundamentally different applications.  They are somewhat
> similar to the user, but they make entirely different tradeoffs.  Eog is
> an image viewer, and is designed around displaying a pixel-based image.
> Evince is a document browser, and is designed around displaying
> primarily vectorized formats.  The image support for evince was added
> primarily for tiffs, and will probably be removed as GdkPixbuf doesn't
> support multi-page tiffs.
> 
> Here are some big differences:
> 
>  * images have a 'natural' size.  Evince assumes the document can be
>    viewed at any size, which is often really wrong for images.
> 
>  * evince's navigation is centered around going linearly through a
>    document -- eog is based on random access to an image.  eg, a good
>    default for an image would be to zoom it to fit so you can see the
>    whole thing.  For a document, you want to be zoomed in to a readable
>    size, which might not show the whole doc.
> 
>  * eog always has the source image around, and can do neat tricks while
>    scrolling/zooming.  Evince has to do an entirely different set of
>    tricks.
> 
>  * evince caches a different set of images than eog does.
> 
>  * documents will have a different set of metadata than images and
>    photos do.
> 
> There are also few user visible gains to be had from merging the
> projects.  There's already sharing of code and ideas between the various
> projects (such as the full-screen mode, etc).  Lets let Jens continue to
> make a kick-ass image viewer, and let the evince team focus on making a
> good document viewer.

Have you seen Comical the comic book reader ( see
http://www.sketchyorigins.com/comics/showthread.php?t=5470 )
which is a prime example of something that evince could support.

CBR files are simply rar files containing images that are the correct
dimension and should be read like a book, sometimes needing two pages at
once to show off splash pages. This is just one step away from
displaying images outright.

Also What about displaying ebooks? There is the Open eBook format
( http://www.openebook.org/ ) also Convert LIT
( http://www.convertlit.com/ ) does all the hard work for .lit files,
they just need displaying with a nice frontend. I can understand
why .lit files may not make it in thanks to the DMCA, I'm not sure if
you can get any .lit files that are not DRM encumbered.

Paul


> Thanks,
> -Jonathan
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