Re: [gnome-love] Nautilus thumbnails for more formats

["mike flyn org" <mike flyn org>]

--- "mike flyn org" <mike flyn org> wrote:
> I am interested in creating external thumbnail creation scripts for all of the 

> file formats I use with GNOME.  Many applications (such as the GIMP) create 
> thumbnails when saving files.  However, relying on this to happen does not 
take 
> into account files that were created by someone else.  I really like the fact 

> that it is easy to add thumbnail creation scripts to nautilus (see gconf's 
> desktop/gnome/thumbnailer configuration parameters).
>
> Here is some of my progress so far:
>
> image/x-xcf:
>
> I am trying to use `gimp --no-data --no-interface --batch '(let* (img (car 
> (gimp-file-load 1 "%u" "%u")))) (gimp-file-save-thumbnail img "%u"))' 
> '(gimp-quit 0)'`.
>
> However, the GIMP does not seem to like to open URLs (vs. simple file paths) 
so 
> this does not work yet.
>
> application/x-dia:
>
> Something like `dia -n -e %o %u`, and use the GIMP to scale the ouput to 
> 128x128.  Note that dia does not like opening URLs yet either.  However, I
> think 
> this should be easy to convince the author to add since dia is part of the
> GNOME 
> office suite.
>
> application/pdf:
>
> `gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -r128x128 -sDEVICE=png16 -sOutputFile=%o %u` also fails 

> because gs does not open URLs.
>
> So there is obviously a trend here.  I have two solutions:
>
> 1.  Add support for opening GNOME VFS URLs to all of these applications (I 
> expect the GIMP and gs authors may protest "GNOMEifying" their applications).
>
> 2.  Allow nautilus to provide thumbnail creation scripts with a file path 
> instead of a URL when the URL is of the FILE:// type (ie: %u is URL, %f is 
file 
> path).
>
> I would be interested to hear comments on people who have been down this road 

> and any suggestions you may have.  GNOME's thumbnailing support is really cool 

> -- its just too bad it only works for such a limited subset of formats. 
>
> By the way, the totem video player distribution provided by Debian's recent 
> unstable packages really does thumbnailing right.  It provided me with a lot 
of 
> examples on how to do this type of stuff.

Okay, I wrote a script called vfstofs that prints the filesystem path equivalent 
of a GNOME VFS URI.  So "gimp `vfstofs -u file:///home/user/foo.png`" works 
nicely.  At this point I only handle the file:// URI class.  It would be nice to 
eventually have a real tool that handles them all (maybe downloads a remote URI 
locally temporarily or something, giving all applications rudimentary access to 
GNOME's VFS).

So now I have thumbnail generators for PDF, XCF, postscript and Dia diagrams 
working pretty well.  I hope to do thumbnailers for AbiWord and gnumeric 
documents next.

How should I share this work?  Who would be interested in this?  Application 
maintainers?  The nautilus maintainers?  Perhaps the maintainers of the 
gnome-icon-theme package?  Or perhaps start a package of my own?

I think this is pretty neat stuff and would like to see it included in standard 
GNOME distributions.  I would appreciate any guidance.

--
Mike