[evince] Suggestions for improving Evince

["Luiz E.M. Cardoso" <luizemcardoso gmx com>]

Dear Sirs,

I am a medical doctor and I have been a Linux user since 2003. My work involves mostly research in pathology, 
and I use Fedora Workstation as my only OS on all of my computers, which include two desktops and three 
different laptops. Presently I am using Fedora 25 Workstation with all updates applied as of 22-Feb-2017. 
Like all scientists, I use computer resources intensively in my work, and my main software tools are 
LibreOffice, Firefox, Gimp, ImageJ, text editors, and the R statistical package. Because all scientific 
articles nowadays are published as PDF files, a PDF viewer is also a crucial, daily tool. Presently I use 
Evince (Document Viewer) as an application for reading and annotating thousands of scientific articles. 
Overall Evince is efficient, but I think that with a few modifications it might become quite good. The 
purpose of this letter is thus to make a few suggestions for improving Evince, based on my experience.

(1) I often use a large monitor (>=28"), and I like to have applications opening at a fixed position and 
geometry (shape) in the Gnome desktop. Some applications automatically retain this information in full, such 
as LibreOffice downloaded from libreoffice.org. Other applications retain only part of this information, such 
as the Gnome file manager, or Nautilus, which retains only screen size and shape, but not the position. And 
there are applications that do not retain any information, such as such as Evince. It seems thus that the 
capability to memorize window position/geometry is randomly assigned to applications. Under KDE, it is 
possible to "force" applications to open at a specified position on the desktop and with a specified shape 
and size, so that when you open the applications you use more frequently, they are all in the position and 
geometry (shape/size) that is best suited for the way you work. But unfortunately, this configurability is 
not universally available in Gnome. In the case of Evince, whenever I click on a different PDF file, it opens 
at a different position and with a different window shape/size. Thus, I have to make the appropriate manual 
changes so that I can have the Evince window, with the article I want to read, and the window of LibreOffice, 
with the manuscript I am writing, positioned side by side, which is very practical. Yet having to make these 
manual adjustments for every PDF file is somewhat annoying, because when I (or any other scientist) am 
writing a scientific text, I have to consult several PDF articles. So it would be very helpful if Evince 
could memorize window position and geometry (shape and size), either automatically or through a configuration 
option (either in Evince itself or in dconf Editor). Even more helpful would be if this functionality were 
globally available for all applications in Gnome desktop, as for example, in the Tweak Tool.

(2) I use Evince's "Annotate the document" a lot. It is extremely useful, and it works very well. I have, 
however, two suggestions to improve this functionality:
(a) Highlighting the text and adding notes to a scientific article is routine work in science, and evidently 
these changes need to be saved for future use. But what I (and most scientists) want to do is simply to 
overwrite the original PDF file, and not save an annotated copy of it. In Evince, this usually requires 
several steps, such as clicking on the "File options" button, selecting "Save a copy...", and often you need 
to change the directory path to where to original PDF is located. Finally, you have to click on a button to 
answer the "Replace" question. My suggestion is thus to create a new button, named something like "Overwrite 
original file". This new button would be located immediately to the right of the "Add highlight annotation" 
button. Therefore, to save the annotations while at the same time overwriting the original file, all that 
would be necessary is to click on the new button. The whole operation would thus require just one click. This 
would be very handy. Still, the current "Save a copy..." functionality should be left as an option.
(b) It is very common in the academic environment to hand over an article you deem important to a graduate 
student or to a colleague. But if the PDF contains annotations, you may not want to have them in the file you 
are handing over. Presently you have to remove one annotation at a time, by right-clicking on each one and 
selecting a function in the context menu. My suggestion is that there should be yet another annotations 
button which would be labeled "Remove all annotations".

(3) Selecting/copying text in Evince works well, but there should also be a way of selecting an image, or to 
select text as image. Presently, to do this, I use an external utility, such as Gnome's Screenshot 
application, which works well, but is less practical.

Please note that, although my suggestions above are based on my experience with Evince in an academic 
environment, I believe that they might be useful in other environments as well.

Best regards,

Luiz E.M. Cardoso, M.D., Ph.D.
State University of Rio de Janeiro
Brazil