Monthly Archives: March 2006

by carlos garcia campos

Evince

A few days ago, juanjo talked to me about beamer, a LaTeX class for creating presentations. It’s awesome! You can install it from ubuntu/debian repositories and it comes with a lot of useful themes. Beamer is thought to be used with pdflatex to generate the output, so it uses some pdf features like specialized links.

The other day I noticed that evince doesn’t support all of the links included in a pdf generated by beamer. Concretely the links that are called in the PDF Reference as “Named Actions”. The named actions that a document viewer is expected to support are NextPage, PrevPage, FisrtPage and LastPage, although there could be additional, nonstandard actions, like Find or GoToPage which are used by beamer.

Poppler already supports Named Actions, but poppler-glib doesn’t. I’ve added support for them in poppler-glib and then in evince too. Since we are “freezed” right now, we have to wait until branch for 2.16 to be able to check it in.

I have started a campaign in GSyC in favour of evince, since many people are still using xpdf. At the moment it seems that grex is convinced as well as acs who didn’t have to be convinced indeed. The big problem is that most of them are using old evince versions, so I’m pretty sure that, when they upgrade to dapper (at least ubuntu users) and try it out again, they all will change their opinion about evince.

by carlos garcia campos

FOSDEM 2006

The last weekend I was at FOSDEM with many people of GSyC (where I’m working since February). It was a great experience.

Just arrived there, we could attend the end of the Richard Stallman talk. Then we all went to the Calibre devroom. First of all Isra made a brief introduction about Calibre, and then Grex started with his presentation.

After the grex talk, acs and I went to the GNOME devroom, it was a little bit difficult to find, because it was moved in the last time. In the presentation jdub asked all of us introduce ourselves. In my opinion it made the GNOME devroom even cosier.

Again in the Calibre devroom Juanjo talked about the Developer Tracking System, it seemed people liked the idea, even grex said that TradeDT (now DeTraS) was the killer-app of the Calibre devroom. Yeah! 🙂

I was very interested in the pvanhoof talk about design patterns with GObject, so I went back to the GNOME Devroom. And the talk didn’t disappoint to me.

Finally on Sunday I was one of the few who got up early to go to the FOSDEM. I wanted to attend the maemo presentation, and was very interested in the svn and valgring talks.

The experience has been really successful.