One Remark To: Evince as universal "Viewer"

[Dennis Heuer <dh triple-media com>]

Hello all

i am not a gnome user and used epdfview because evince was soo
gnome-dependent. however, i managed to get evince running without gnome
(except of the icon theme (???)) and would like to stick to it.

first, a general compliment on speed and usage!!!

second, i stumbled upon the discussion refered to in the subject, which
was actually held at desktop-devel. i think that the discussion was
really desktop-centric and not taking into account people like me who
don't have gnome, abiword or even oo.o installed. this is why i want
to put in just one remark:

nowaddays, i am confronted with lots of content, especially from the
internet, which is not supported natively on my fully-from-source
system. however, i'd want to 'view' it too without having to compile
oo.o myself.

this is like with media streams. on youtube, i can see it all because
the binary flash plugin from adobe works even on my ffs-system.
luckily, lots of itv-channels work too. however, some would work, at
least with my xine player, if not the sites were expecting a special
plugin (most often mplayer or vlc). they just refuse to work otherwise
and don't even provide a link to the stream. i don't like the way the
mplayer plugin behaves, and for vlc i'd need wxwidgets etc. so what? i
just can't see the streams though xine could play well here.

so it is with evince. evince could play well in many cases where i
don't need support for editing a file but still want to read it, which
is not possible to me because the author did not put a link to a pdf
version on his site.

this is why a viewer differs from an editor in more than the terms
express. the viewer is a door to the world. please consider this.

if you make support for 'editable' formats (i mean, only because there
is no free pdf editor, pdf is not a pure printer format.) optional, the
distributor can disable them in favour to the editors and i can enable
them in favour to my ffs-system.

many thanks for reading,
dennis heuer