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.