devilspie or wmctrl as work a-rounds. 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. St
ill, 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
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