Viewing your documents, one page at a time

Yup, Jonathan mentioned this before but the last few days of work in December a lot of people on the Red Hat Desktop team had already taken off for vacation so we had a mini-hackfest.

Evince

So here’s the story… We pooled whatever people weren’t on vacation together to examine gpdf and ggv and xpdf to see what could be ripped out (like bonobo) and what could be used (like xpdf). Instead of destroying some other application what came out of the mini-hackfest was something new called Evince. Actually Evince had already existed from work by Martin and Marco before, but we (and lots of others) all pooled together making it even better.

Evince viewing the PDF Reference

Document Viewer

What is Evince? It’s a document viewer. It’s kind of the answer to the postcript, pdf, dvi, [insert document here] viewer problem that we’ve always had.

So far it’s not ready to take over for gpdf and ggv and possibly others, but it’s getting there very quickly. It’s designed to be a simple multi-page document viewer, it has support for thumbnails and bookmarks right now. Zooming and most other functions are working or coming along since it is still very much at the early stages of stability.

There are no releases out yet so you’ll have to grab this from cvs gnome/evince. If you’d like to try it out really quickly it is in jhbuild just do

jhbuild build evince

and then run with

jhbuild run evince