gene heskett posted on Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:09:06 -0400 as excerpted:
> On Sunday, July 17, 2011 11:02:42 AM Duncan did opine:
>
>> gene heskett posted on Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:54:32 -0400 as excerpted:
>> > Hijacking a thread here, but it sure needs help. When okular is set
>> > to auto-scale, it sends to a US letter printer about 9" wide, so the
>> > right hand inch is missing. Whomever decided it should be FF's
>> > default pdf reader needs a very close examination of their thinker.
>> > Adobe reader Just Works(TM).
>>
>> But adobe's reader is not freedomware,
> All pretty much true Duncan. What I was pointing out was that even xpdf
> in its final versions did a much better job than okular. So did
> ghostscript back about version 5.2, before the pdf interpreter was
> removed.
You talk about xpdf as if it's no longer around. Gentoo has version 3.02
(gentoo revision 4) in the tree, as well as a "live" sources version (the
gentoo convention for which is to use version 9999), tho of course that's
masked so it won't be installed unless someone chooses to deliberately
unmask it. If xpdf were no longer being developed, having the live
version especially, would be useless. (That said, v3.02 first appeared
in the tree in Nov. 2007, according to the gentoo changelog, so there's
not /that/ much happening to it, but its functionality is reasonably
mature, AFAIK, especially if as John L. points out it's poppler based,
which seems to be the case based on dependencies, so it probably only
needs a maintenance release now and then, when the libraries it depends
on and the compilers that build it change enough to warrant collecting
all the various accumulated distro patches into a new release.)
BTW, both xpdf and okular appear to be poppler based, now, so I'd guess
there's not so much difference in xpdf rendering, etc.
Meanwhile, xpdf as a default would be fine from the angle I advanced
above, since it's freedomware.
But there's a point that has been missed in all this. The default
associations probably depend on what you have installed and the desktop
you use. You mentioned firefox associations specifically. Here, a quick
check says that firefox is set to save pdfs, with the download window
popping up so I can click on the file there to open it with the local
system associated app. Since I'm running kde as my desktop of choice,
and okular is kde's pdf app, because I've not set anything else as higher
priority in my own user associations, that's what gets opened when I
click the file in firefox's download window.
Of course, gnome users who don't have kde and thus don't have okular
installed would get it opened in an entirely different app. If both were
installed, I imagine gnome would use its preference and kde would use its
preference, unless the user overrode that, tho I'm decidedly NOT a gnome
person so wouldn't know.
I imagine the same would happen with other desktops, xfce, lxde, etc, tho
as you scale down the desktop features they'd depend more and more on
specific user config.
Meanwhile, in my kde config, it appears krita (which I have installed as
I needed an image processing app that could handle 8-bit alpha, but
kolourpaint only handles 1-bit alpha, and krita had less uninstalled
dependencies than digikam, when I checked) is associated with pdfs as
well. I had no idea it could handle pdf. I'll have to experiment a
bit! But it's ranked lower than okular in the associations, which makes
sense.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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