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.
Creating viewer/editor combo applications means that people have to figure out which application to open a document with and switch apps to view/edit the document. (for some reason this makes me think we're creating a VI edit/view mode for our office apps) You end up with a desktop that opens .doc's for "Viewing" by default and then you have to figure out a way to get to the editor. Yes, we could supply a [Edit] button from Evince to opens up the registered editor but that isn't a solution, it's a hack for getting fast reading. What if the situation were that someone wanted to "quickly edit" the document? We just failed. There are a couple things about Evince that make it seem like a really great choice for doing this. For each of these reasons the Office applications should look into taking advantage of this instead of Evince handling their document types. The number one reason people give is that Evince is fast and Abiword or OOo or [insert office app here] is slow when you just want to read a document. The best fix for this is for those other applications should be profiled to decrease their open and file load speed. Evince has some awesome profiling support that has been built into it which helps us out a lot. I'm sure the other apps have something like this, if not they should. If "Just reading" is a user interaction that people think Evince does well with docs and those office applications want to support, they should look into doing something like that. A similar presentation mode maybe? Also, Evince has a great document find system that it shares with Epiphany's find plugin. Other document editors out there might benefit from using this same find toolbar. I'm sure they'll have to add things like replace and what not, but GEdit is working on this right now. Evince does nice Thumbnailing of pages to give quick overview of a document and visual based page navigation. There's no reason an Office app could do the same. We have a cool entry completion [1] from the Page Entry area that could definitely be done by an document based office application. Anyway, I didn't want to drag out this thread except to say that Evince is designed to make a persons interaction of navigating and reading a document slick and easy. Office applications should be doing the same thing + editing made slick and easy ;-) Cheers, ~ Bryan P.S. I think the ourselves and GOffice people should all be working together on this kind of stuff. Evince and Epiphany are hand in hand sharing design ideas and code, join the fun! [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172453 On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 10:42 -0700, Alan wrote: > I'd like to see evince add functionality not for images (which as others > have said have different needs than documents), but for other doc types. > It'd be great to view .doc, .swx, .pdf, .abiword, etc documents all able > to be viewed from one application. Having a nice similar thumbnail, > bookmark, system for all docs would be great. Of course, it's also nice > to have it *fast*. The big thing about the preview app on os/x is that > it's lightning fast :) _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
