GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 316962
default view should be configurable
Last modified: 2011-04-13 18:40:04 UTC
I prefer to view PDFs fit to the screen, non-continous. I like that evince remembers how I last viewed a particular document, but I'm getting sick of repeatedly changing the view every time I open a new document. I understand the desire to make evince so simple it doesn't need preferences, but get real. Not everyone wants to view fit to width continuous. I don't think this sort of thing should be limited to gconf-editor, but I checked there and also saw no sign of an override. Other information:
*** Bug 319089 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Stuart, please look at the patch for bug 168450
I'm not sure I follow what the patch is doing. It looks like it remembers the last view that was used. What happens when I open a zoomed continuous document and close it? Looks like the next new document I open will also be zoomed continuous. This isn't what I want. Face it, whether or not to show continuous or non-continous by default is a _preference_. I shouldn't have to fight my document viewer just because I recently opened a document that in a view different from my normal preference. That's what it feels like right now: a fight. All it would take is a couple of simple quesions in a very basic preference window: Do you prefer new documents to be viewed continous or not? How do you want to fit new documents? Do you want to see the sidebar? If so, do you prefer thumbnails or indexes? I congratulate the evince developers are trying very hard to make things "just work", but you'll never make everyone happy. People can handle 5 or 6 simple questions. It isn't "crack" to recognize that different people have different preferences.
*** Bug 320943 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just a few observations: I agree that the Continuous and Dual view options are preferences and should be user configurable on the application level. With regards to sizing I really don't have a problem with an automagic sizing algorithm. Right now evince fails miserably because the default window is relatively small. And not only that. It's *square*. I don't read many documents on formatted to fit on square paper. xpdf gets this right. Finally, I really think you need to reconsider your use cases with regards to the view options. While the concept of saving size and settings on a per document basis is great and works, I'd say that 90%+ of the PDF documents I read are transient docs that come off the web. Most of them I'll never see again, and this is the common case for everybody I work with. So I think the current approach of only getting settings right when the document is reopened is flawed. It's the interplay between user preference and heuristics on first load that's important...
Chiming in, as my comments on #311024 seem to have been lost when that bug was closed... I'm not a fan of continuous mode at all; it's the first thing I turn off in any viewer. I also use evince for different tasks -- for example, at one point I was reviewing around twenty theses to make sure that they looked okay in a general sense (page breaks, widows and orphans, etc.), and being able to tell evince to use dual-mode, noncontinuous for all those documents would have been very handy instead of having to go in and set things individually for each document. Also -- if settings are stored for each document, how are you handling my all-too-frequent use case of opening a document from an e-mail message or downloaded from the Web, looking through it, then closing or deleting it, with no plans to ever look at it again? Is there a slowly growing file containing per-document settings somewhere? Please, please, please add options to set some of these options so they persist across evince invocations. Maybe just being able to switch between per-document and default settings would do the trick. (Maybe you could set the per-document setting per document?) Being able to specify options via a command-line flag or argument would also be handy, but I'm happy to open an evince, set it up the way I want it, then be able to open documents that will inherit those options. I'm even happy to have to go in and muck around with settings in Gconf if you really want to keep options hidden, but please make them configurable somehow!
Default view _is_ configurable, you should probably try latest evince first.
@Nickolay: it is? Please tell me where to find it in 2.20 then?
Hm, I'm probably unclear and completely wrong but here is what I mean: Open any document, set fit page, disable continuous. Close it. Open any other document you never opened before, it will fit the page and and will not use continuous layout. Does work for me in 2.20. Isn't it configuration?
OK, I understand now. It is configuration, just not exposed in the GUI. People are getting confused about this, witness bug 542160.
Could I ask some details about : Where and how to write this configuration. I didn't see any relative line anywhere.
As there a button "Save current settings as default" in the "edit" menu since Evince 2.32, I am closing this bug. Feel free to file a new bug if the feature does not fit all your needs.