Re: automatic presentation mode

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Guillaume Desmottes <cass skynet be> writes:

> At the RMLL, Vincent Untz has made a gnome-love presentation and
> illustrated it by making a patch to add automatic presentation mode into
> evince.
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309815
> 
> As a new developer, i would like to continue the work on this feature.
> I have some interrogations about the best way to do it.

So, here's my thinking on presentations.  Those who've talked to me on
IRC know that I've gone back and forth on this feature a lot of times,
and I've been pretty negative on it for a while.  I'd really, really
like evince to be primarily a kick-ass document reader and I wasn't sure
how well presentations fit into that.  It seemed that making a really
good presentation program would be orthogonal to our primary goal.

After talking with Bryan today, we came up with the following proposal:

 * We should merge the separate 'Presentation' and 'Fulcrum' modes.
   'Presentation' mode is just fullscreen without dual or continuous
   set.  This kills a menu-option, and (more importantly), a series of
   code-paths in ev-view.c.

 * PDFs can set hints indicating that they want to start in
   single/non-continuous mode.  I would imagine that most applications
   creating presentations will set this, which means that it will 'just
   work' for most presentations.  Additionally, we can key off the
   transitions dictionary for more hints.

 * Keep the popup toolbar in fullscreen mode.  In single/non-continuous
   mode, we can add a play button (a la totem) to the toolbar.  We can
   add a speed slider too if need be.  That would get rid of the speed
   option, and put these controls in a place where it's most useful for
   the user.

Does this make sense to people?  Guillaume, does this sound like
something that you're interested in working on?

Thanks,
-Jonathan