qpdfview team mailing list archive

[Adam Reichold <adamreichold@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hello Sandor,

Am 18.01.2013 15:59, schrieb Sandor Ortegon:
> 
> 
> Hi!
> 
> 
> Sorry that I was kind of lost for a long time; I had too much work
> and teaching duties so I didn't have the time to send comments
> about my favourite viewer, but here I am again. Despite not being
> reporting issues, actually i use qpdfview every day, so I am aware
> of what is happening with the program.

Nice to hear from you again.

> Issues:
> 
> 1) Last time I checked, the deb file for qpdfview (I use the daily
> ppa) doesn't have all the dependencies for installing correctly the
> program. It is not easy to discover this, because usually you
> install other Qt-based programs before. But when I installed Ubuntu
> 12.10 and choose qpdfview as my first program to install, I
> realized that at least the icon theme is not incorporated so you
> don't see the icons in the menu bar. Later on I installed
> Libreoffice and it asked for several icon themes, so I installed
> the tango icon theme and everything was back to normal.

I am not sure I understand you correctly on where icons are missing,
but I suspect this is intended behavior: The program can be used
without an icon theme, hence there is no dependency on one. If there
is no suitable icon theme present, only fallback and
application-specific icons that are shipped with qpdfview are
available but those should be displayed in the menus and tool bars.

I also just checked the package, and on quantal we do not depend on
libqt4-svg which is necessary to render the included icons. This is
strange as we link against it, but since we do not use its symbols
directly, maybe this gets optimized away by debhelper for newer
packaging standard versions. So I'll try adding an explicit dependency
as with libqt4-sql-sqlite. (It would be great if you could test this
when there is some spare time.)

> 2) I am glad you want to use qpdfview to see PS and Djvu files ... 
> that's wonderful and one step closer to uninstall ugly Evince from
> my computer!!  The only thing missing for LaTeX users are the
> display of EPS and DVI files, I hope these can be viewed in the
> future :)

EPS files are more or less the same as PostScript file and can already
be displayed, but we forgot about them in the file dialog
configuration. But I just committed the necessary changes.

DVI support is not yet implemented. The 0.4 version will undoubtedly
bring major breakage in any case, so it is probably we stick to PDF,
PS and DjVu for the moment. Maybe this could be done in a 0.4.x version.

> However, there are some issues I would like to report:
> 
> (a) DJVU files take a lot of time to open (appear on screen). 
> Fortunately, once the first page appears on the screen, the
> rendering is fine and fast ... so the problem is only in startup
> time, Of course, my comparisons correspond to DjView and Evince.
> And I like the fact that qpdfview is much lighter than DjView; the
> latter suffers the same problem I reported several months ago that
> happened to Okular about RAM consumption after scrolling pages.
> qpdfview does not suffer from this problem anymore.

This is probably due to the fact the document opening is done in a
synchronous manner in qpdfview, blocking the interface until at least
the properties of all pages are loaded. This works better with PDF
than with DjVu files. Evince and DjView probably do not block the
interface for opening such documents or do not load all the
information at once. We can probably implement some of these
strategies in qpdfview as well, but for the moment I would not aim for
it in 0.4 but again rather some 0.4.x release.

> (b) I think it could be considered to separate default rendering 
> settings depending on the document type (PDF, DjView and PS) in
> the settings. The reason is that they need different choices to see
> them correctly. My test here was based in using the program in two
> different computers, one laptop and one desktop.
> 
> - PDF fonts are viewed optimally when using antialiasing and text 
> antialiasing. So I keep them checked in the settings dialog. -
> However, PS fonts are not viewed optimally using those settings. I 
> need to unckeck both to see correctly the text. - Usually I view
> PDF and PS files using the zoom at 100% by default. However, this
> is not frequent for DJVU files, because most of them came from
> scanning original texts, so usually you need something like a two
> page mode and fit width, rather than height.
> 
> So currently, it is a bit cumbersome to alternate changing modes 
> according to the filetype, when there could be a way to choose
> these default depending on the document type. I know you can save
> settings per file (useful for old files stored in my computer), but
> still you would need to change preferences for each new file.

Alexander already proposed per plug-in settings (meaning those in the
settings dialog) and I'd say this is good idea, but again something
that better waits for a 0.4.x release. (I know I said this thrice now,
but I do plan for an incremental development style as with the 0.3.x
series.)

> Thanks for your attention and happy new year!. I you guys need
> something else I can test, I will gladly do it.

Thanks! The offer is very much appreciated. At the moment, the most
important test would probably be stability, i.e. testing the program
with as any different files of the supported formats as possible and
trying to make it misbehave. The abstraction layer to support several
formats has probably broken a some implicit assumptions in the code,
so I expect quite a few bugs...

Best regards, Adam.

> Best wishes,
> 
> Sandor
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