On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 13:23 -0800, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: > I'm not sure how new users are supposed to find evince. Yum isn't a > command that newbies are likely to be familiar with. Old-timers from > the BSD world might try "man -k pdf" but that doesn't find evnice > either. Various add/remove software helpers allow one to search through them using keywords, with those words being looked for in the package names and descriptions. Granted that Evince isn't a great example, as it just lists itself as a document reader. Instead of being more explicit, and saying that it can read PDFs and PostScript files. I'd call that a serious enough omission to warrant a bugzilla entry, as it stops people finding it when searching for a PDF application. I think such programs should have pdf viewer and pdf reader set as package search keywords. Though, that sort of "find me a pdf application" search should have returned several alternatives. On Fedora 9, I find at least these: epdfview.i386 : Lightweight PDF document viewer gsview.i386 : PostScript and PDF previewer pdfcube.i386 : PDF presentation viewer with a spinning cube Hmm, pdfcube sound intriguing! > Even on fedora-14 I can't seem to find it on the pull-down > menus. Yes, that's a bugbear with me, too. It's hidden, for some obscure reason. You have to edit the menus to unhide it. It's not the only useful app that's hidden, either. Then there's applications with weird names. The specs for the files the the menus are made from (.desktop) carry the following information in them: Program name, e.g. Evince. Generic name, e.g. PDF and PS document reader Descriptive comment, e.g. A program to read documents in the PDF and PS formats As far as I'm concerned, the default should be set to suit newcomers, and show both program name and generic name, in the menu, with the description as a hover-over pop-up information window. Particularly when it comes to obtusely named applications (e.g. Evince, Seahorse, Nautilus, Konqueror, k3b, et cetera). For my money, I see worse names in the kde desktop than the Gnome one. Let the more savvy users configure the menus to be shorter. I think that it should, also, be required that they're filled-in properly before the package is accepted into Fedora. I've always managed to find some applications which omit one or more of those attributes from the .desktop files, or the information is under the wrong attribute. There is a specification for how the .desktop files are supposed to be filled in, and they're not adhering to it. > The way I found it back when I started using a linux distribution > (back in fc4 days) was to let firefox open up a pdf file, spawn the > reader and then I opened a shell window and did a PS to see what the > viewer was called. I think the way most people open a file, now, is either when they try to open it with their filemanager, or read a file through their web browser. In either case, once the application has loaded up, most give their naming details in the "about" entry in their help menu. There's no need to grep through ps to find it. You can make a reasonable assumption that a program called "Evince" is probably going to be started by a binary called evince or Evince, and try the lazy typing all-lower-case first, since that's the long-term habit of Linux. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
