Re: Nautilus document viewer

[Paul van der Vlis <paul vandervlis nl>]

Sriram Ramkrishna schreef:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 02:21:25PM +0200, Paul van der Vlis wrote:
>
> > They want to change to Linux desktops, but this is really a problem.
> >
> > Evince is not usable, they will never view files like word, openoffice, 
> > e.g.  Further is Evince a seperate program, you need to open/close it. 
> > It's so great from Powerdesk or Nautilus with Bonobo that you do not 
> > have to open/close a program, and that everything is viewed in 1 window.
>
> Hmm.  I'm not sure I understand.  Evince is very fast and can easily
> and very quickly load pdfs and word processing files, even powerpoint
> slides without the overhead of running a full blown program like
> open office and what not. (actually not sure about open office)

Bryan Clark wrote:
-----
I've said no to this stuff several times already.  Like Jonathan said I
think Evince can do a great job viewing vector based documents, however
I think it will be a bad idea to use it as a viewer for these other
documents.
----

http://live.gnome.org/Evince/SupportedDocumentFormats
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-April/msg00159.html

> Is this a case where your customer has gotten used to a feature
> and not willing to let it go?  Embedding programs was cool but
> it wasn't stable.  You're customers would not be well served by
> complex engineering that could fail.  

OK, it should be stable...

> The simple approach of using
> having a universal viewer is actually a good idea.  Could you try
> your users on some of them and see what they think?

They want a file-manager with integrated viewer. They don't want to do 
"file | open | document", but simply select a document from a directory 
to be viewed.

It could be a seperate program, but they want to see both a file-list 
and a document at the same time.

> > I think something like a document viewer would be great as a plugin for 
> > Nautilus.
>  
> I'm not sure it's possible.  Maybe in the future.  But in the mean time
> there are ways to address the actual problem "quickly accessing 
> information in front of a user"  In the future products like "Dashboard"
> can give information "real time" without opening anything.  

Thank you, I had never heard of Dashboard. But it's not really what they 
want (maybe it's better)

With regards,
Paul van der Vlis.