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

[Gérard Milmeister <gemi bluewin ch>]

> 
> 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.
Ah that's news to me. I googled for nautilus thumbnailer, but I have not
found anything interesting.
> 
> 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).
Well, ImageMagick delegates to gs, and there are some PDFs that are not
handled by gs. Ghostscript is generally pretty bad at PDFs, Xpdf is much
better, but doesn't support latest standards. Otherwise I think
ImageMagick is pretty good for these tasks, it also handles .dvi files.

> See ya.
> 
> -- 
> Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>
> SITACS, University of Wollongong
-- 
Gérard Milmeister
Tannenrauchstrasse 35
8038 Zürich
gemi bluewin ch