Re: HOWTO: Postscript/PDF/xfig thumbnails without rebuilding nautilus

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 16:41, Gérard Milmeister wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 08:02, Peter Harvey wrote:
> > On Sun, 2003-05-04 at 00:58, Steve Dunham wrote:
> > > Below is an example of how to add external thumbnailers via
> > > gconf entries. I searched google for a way to do pdf thumbnails
> > > in nautilus, but I only found patches for Nautilus itself. So
> > > I don't think this technique is widely known and thought someone
> > > else may find it useful.
> > > 
> > > I used perl scripts, because nautilus passes URLs for the source
> > > filename, and I was too lazy to write shell code to decode them.
> 
> To add my two cents, I also had made something like this. I use
> ImageMagick to generate thumbnails:
> 
> http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/staff/milmei/nautilus/
> 
> It works quite well here. Some pdf files however fail to get thumbnails
> generated.


Just noticed something in your scripts - the use of gconftool to get the
correct size for thumbnails. I've been told (on this list) that we
should be using %s in our schemas. That will be converted to the correct
(according to whatever program wants the thumbnail) size. Default is
256.

I think in older versions of Nautilus this didn't work, so my scripts
default to 256 if the third argument isn't supplied.

When you say that some thumbnails fail for some PDF documents, is it
because ImageMagick can't handle that PDF? Or is it because the file was
in the process of being written? There does seem to be a race-condition
occurring when a file is being written and a thumbnailer fails to
generate a thumbnail because of that. I haven't looked into it in too
much detail yet. Obviously this will only happen to you if you're
generating PDFs (eg. pdflatex).

See ya.

-- 
Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>
SITACS, University of Wollongong