print preview and evince

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

I've been running gnumeric 1.7.8 (non-gnome build) very happily 
for some time.  I recently tried updating to 1.7.11, but that 
version was broken for non-gnome use, so I went to current svn.

I've built gnumeric OK, but print preview doesn't work because 
it's looking for evince, which is not installed on my system.  I 
started along the line of installing evince, but this introduces a 
big stack of dependencies, including gnome-icon-theme, gnome-vfs 
and gnome-keyring-1, and then at one remove, poppler-glib, 
libgcrypt, libgpg-error, etc, etc.

With gnumeric 1.7.8 one could get print preview via libgnomeprint, 
which, despite having "gnome" in its name, was very light in terms 
of its further dependencies.  

I realize that most people who use gnumeric will have a full gnome 
installation, but I'd like to register a mild protest.  To build 
in a dependency on evince, which is a full-featured program with a 
substantial stack of dependencies in its own right -- most of 
which have nothing at all to do with printing from gnumeric -- 
seems like a retrograde step to me.  Assuming, that is, that part 
of the object is to make the excellent gnumeric available to as 
wide a range of users as possible.

(I'm not usually too bothered whether print preview is available 
or not, but in the case of printing a spreadsheet, where things 
can easily go badly wrong, it's very helpful, if it works right.)

Allin Cottrell

--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC