Re: Feature suggestion: file reload

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Roderich Schupp wrote:
> > But what some of us really would like to see is a "watch file" feature
> > making automatic reloads.  "gv" and "xdvi" have this feature.
> >     
>
> This has come up repeatedly on the list before, google for
> "evince reload site:mail.gnome.org", read the first few hits and also
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304249
Also helps to search for "evince watch file site:mail.gnome.org" to get 
other relevant hits.  This feature has been a willow in the winds for 
sometime now. 

In some original user research we found that people doing latex didn't 
want an auto file reload because they would like to compare latex 
changes.  Using a manual ctrl-R reload allowed for this to happen, 
having two instances of a document open allowed you to refresh one and 
zoom in on changes to compare to the stale instance.  Of course not too 
long after that we made Evince keep a 1:1 document to window ratio which 
you would assume breaks the use case of those latex users we originally 
talked to.  However no one seems to be filing bugs about not being able 
to open a document more than once so perhaps we don't have that audience 
or they just don't use evince that way?  I don't know.

There were suggestions for ways to still compare changes with an 
auto-reload system, but it involves check box items hidden where people 
won't really find them or in the open where they are completely 
confusing to most people.  Neither situation is ideal.  I remember some 
ideas about using command line options as well. 

Now since we've long had this 1:1 ratio of document to evince without 
much complaint AFAIK I don't see why we don't have a file watch on every 
file evince has opened.  It seems we've always had some issues that need 
to be overcome in the back end regarding the reloading but the idea of 
the feature seems sound.

Also I think at some point we had attempted to create a D-BUS interface 
for latex users, this is the idea I tended to like the most.  By opening 
up the D-BUS interface of Evince to allow extra tweaking options someone 
could easily create a pygtk + d-bus UI that listed all the documents 
evince had opened and allowed you to watch some of them and not watch 
others; a latex-evince / postscript-evince toolkit if you will.  We 
could ship this thing as a separate application to evince and anyone 
doing latex development could use it to really be a pro-evince user.  I 
think we were just lacking evince / latex developers to do the work.

Cheers,
~ Bryan