The Grumpy Interaction Designer’s Guide to PDF Viewers

Just use Evince. Evince is reaching a new release mark of 0.2 soon and to celebrate we have a new project web site (go ahead, follow the link). The web site design was done by Diana Fong, our Desktop Visual Designer while I did the HTML and CSS, which if any is the part might be busted.

What’s happened since the last time I blabbed about Evince?

• We have a mailing list
• We have an IRC channel
• We have a project page
• We have a bugzilla component
• Thumbnailing has improved
• Indexing has improved
• Find has improved (a little)
• That old screenshot made peoples eyes bleed

It’s like we’re a real project!

Several people have sent me the link to the lwn article where the Grumpy Editor Series took a look at PDF Viewers and what’s out there. I found it interesting to read his notes on what’s needed in a document viewer and where some of them lacked.

Mostly his argument seemed to boil down to two things: Find is invaluable and keep the UI small and simple. Both of which are things we tried to do with Evince, I noted that he didn’t like the Back/Forward buttons, perhaps it’s worth looking at removing them in future versions as I admit I’m not sure if they are all that useful.

So check out the web site, check out Evince join the mailing list, hop on the IRC channel. Don’t email me about the XHTML errors in the page unless you have a patch that leaves the pages exactly as they are, otherwise I don’t care.