GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 347694
nautilus should display odf thumbnails
Last modified: 2008-10-22 14:26:18 UTC
nautilus should display contents of opendocument files. there is even a .png thumbnail ready inside every opendocument file. and windows explorer uses it to preview documents. nautilus tries to preview even sound files, documents that are visual make in my opinion even more sense.
This could help toward fixing this bug: http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2006/09/06/448-experimental-hack-ooo-thumbnailer
This is a showstopper for Awn as it uses thumbnails from Gnome to dislays windows. The question is : should we thumbnail it with abiword, openoffice, try to find both on the system , starting by openoffice (renders more files in a better way) then switching back to abiword and then eventually abandon if no text could be found. Anyway, It would be great to solve this problem and to provide a default solution (it doesn't have to imply that openoffice or abiword is installed, as it can abandon thumbnailing) In a first time, it could be disabled by default in Gconf to avoid unecessary memory use, and distros could choose to enable it or not. Thumbnailers should also be generalised and given a lot more love (MacOS Leopard and Vista just gave thumbnails a lot of work, Leopard even have an instant view feature that enables a file to be seen fullscreen (without opening the app) by a mere press on the spacebar, but this part would require compositing I guess, or at least a way to launch a stipped down version of the application in an invisible way) Other things lacking this thumbnail functions are webpages (html, and possibly php if a server is installed on the pc), gimp images (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=362629) and various other tinier programs (less important, but we should find a generic way to handle them such as launching a Gui-less version of the program if the user's config is strong enough, can be again disabled by default)
I found a ubuntuforums.org thread with other versions than Hubert's (adding overlays, using or not the Openoffice.org 2 thumbnail included in newer odf documents... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76566
*** Bug 488951 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 541867 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Please file a bug against OpenOffice.org with the instructions found at http://library.gnome.org/devel/integration-guide/stable/thumbnailer.html.en for precise instructions on how to thumbnail files in such a way that Nautilus and GNOME can make use of. You may want to point them at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76566 which already has an implementation of a thumbnailer that is almost ready-to-use (needs GIO port). Closing this as NOTGNOME. Please feel free to report any further bugs you may find.
I disagree with the "NOTGNOME" Anyway gsf-office-thumbnailer that come with libgsf does it.
If you want it closed as something else, that's fine by me too; the point is there exists a correct way to do this that doesn't involve nasty tricks here.