On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 12:18:59AM +0200, Uwe Stöhr wrote:
> El 30.07.2017 a las 23:47, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes escribió:
> 
> > > would therefore like to support it in LyX.
> > 
> > To be frank I never heard of it before today. It seems to be some 
> > commercial program which only can be found as demo. I am not very fond of 
> > promoting such things.
> 
> It is not a demo. Only if you want to have all features like e.g. splitting
> PDF pages one has to buy another version. So it is the same as with Acrobat
> Reader, for the full feature set of Acrobat one has to pay.
> 
> There are packages for Master PDF in the Debian/Ubuntu and Arch package
> system available maybe for other package systems too.
> 
> In general I don't think we should judge programs according to their
> business model. LyX does not force to use a program he might not like. If a
> user likes a closed source program like Acrobat Reader it is very helpful
> that LyX checks for it.

I use Master PDF Editor and think it is a good program. I have never
paid for it, and have used it quite a bit, without noticing any missing
features (I'm not saying there are none, just that I haven't noticed
any). Another positive thing for me is that the developers are
responsive to feedback (they're available through direct email support).
They make frequent releases, and have a detailed change log:

https://code-industry.net/what-is-new-in-master-pdf-editor-4/

My initial reservation for including it as a viewer is that it really is
meant to be an editor, not a viewer. However, I just opened a multi-page
PDF, and I can now see how someone might want to use it as a viewer
(even though I would personally still prefer a more simple viewer): it
seems smooth and responsive, and has continuous scrolling; and I'm not
surprised by Uwe's finding that it has support for some feature that
other PDF programs on Linux do not.

One thing that annoys me is that the (major) version number of the
software is part of the binary's name: masterpdfeditor4. So if we did
include it, then when version 5 is released, we would need to add a new
entry (or have a policy of only supporting the latest).

In conclusion, I have no strong opinion. I just wanted to say that "I
have heard of the program and find it to be a respectable program,
compared to any other proprietary program I've used".

So when making a decision I would summarize it as "should we add a PDF
editor that probably not many LyX users are using as a PDF viewer?" I
really don't have a good feeling for the cost of checking for another
viewer so I don't know how to answer that question myself. I must admit
though that I did (after checking on the list) add a relatively unknown
PDF reader to configure: mupdf.

Scott

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