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by carlos garcia campos

GNOME 2.22 is out!


GNOME 2.22

This release is very special, since it includes an important architectural change, Gio/Gvfs a replacement for GNOME-VFS. Many people have worked hard to bring us a new GNOME stable release with important architectural changes, without regressions and in a six months release cycle. It’s awesome!. Not so much time ago, we didn’t have support for some basic network protocols such as ftp, the connect to server dialog in nautilus hadn’t been ported to Gio/Gvfs as well as many of our core modules, computer:// and network:// weren’t implemented either, etc. There are too many heroes in this release. Thanks to everybody. I love the GNOME community and I’m really happy to be part of it.

Evince 2.22

There are also many improvements in Evince for this new GNOME release:

  • Most of the annoying popups dialogs have been replaced by a message area in the view. Based on the gedit message area.
  • Transition effects in presentations are now supported (Thanks Carlos!)
  • Thanks to the Google Highly Open Participation Contest automatic and kinetic scrolling have been implemented
  • Many many improvements and bug fixes in the PS backend thanks to the use of libspectre.
  • Important performance improvements of speed and memory consumption
  • Many other bugs fixed

Formula 1

The new season starts this weekend. I’m looking forward to watching the first race

by carlos garcia campos

Evince and libspectre

It’s not a surprise that libspectre was thought to be used mainly (but not only) by evince and okular. I’ve just committed a patch to evince to use libspectre when it’s present, otherwise falling back to gs. I haven’t removed the old gs code because libspectre is still too new and it’s not yet shipped by distros.

There are many many advantages of using libspectre in evince, some of them:

  • One of the most important advantages is probably that it’s noticeable faster.
  • Postscript printing improvements: print as PDF, multiple copies (bug #443859), reverse and collate are now supported.
  • Page labels
  • PS specials support in dvi documents (bug #386005)
  • Other bugs fixed: #317106, #499787, #501235, #421879, #445797, #486547
by carlos garcia campos

Extracting images with Evince

Finally, the patch I wrote to allow extracting images from a PDF has been applied to poppler cvs head (thanks Albert). Evince already supports this feature since 0.7.1 version. Here is a screencast.

Evince images handling
(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~3.0 MBytes)

Images selection is not supported yet, but I’m already working on it 😉

Evince images selection
Select images
by carlos garcia campos

Google Summer of Code 2007

The list of approved projects has been announced!. Iñigo Martínez, a student from the Universidad del País Vasco, is going to be my student to implement annotations support in Evince. We received more than ten proposals to implement annotations support so the final decision hasn’t been easy. I’ve been talking with Iñigo and he seems to be very motivated so I’m quite sure the project is not going to fail this year. Now is time to work and enjoy hacking!

by carlos garcia campos

Evince 0.7.0!

Evince 0.7 has been released. It’s a development release, but I recommend to upgrade since it has some new features and lots of bug fixes.

Nickolay has added a preliminary implementation of history, it’s not finished yet but it’s a good start point.

Since Evince is a single instance application, many people complained because it wasn’t possible to open the same document in multiple windows. This is possible now. A new option “Open a copy” has been added, so that you can open a copy of the current document in a new window.

Presentation mode has also improved a lot. Wouter has added screensaver detection, based on totem code, so that screensaver is stopped when evince is in presentation mode. A new page has been added after the last one to indicate that presentation has finished and how to exit, like in any other presentation tool. Finally, you can blank the screen by pressing ‘b’ if you want to fill the screen with black, or by pressing ‘w’ to fill it with white. This is another feature which is present in other presentation tools.

Many bugs has been fixed in printing. Settings such as scale, copies, collate, reverse, odd/even, etc. are working again now. A new page setup dialog has been added to be able to select paper size, margins, paper layout, etc. Finally, printing to a PDF file is now supported too.

Many other bugs have been fixed too, see official announce for details.

by carlos garcia campos

Good bye Java!

After a course having to program in Java for several uni subjects, now I can happily remove java from my system :-))

$ sudo rm -r /opt/java

CPUFreq Applet

In my last post I talked about my cpufreq-applet plans for the current release cycle. Finally I’ve rewritten most of the applet and here are the results so far:

  • Rewrite cpufreq selector popup: done (Fixed bugs #336449, #338557)
  • Use libcpufreq from cpufrequtils: almost done. At the moment libcpufreq is used only in the monitor, but I’ll use it also in the selector soon.

Evince

GTK+ is using evince as a previewer in the new printing stuff. Great!. I’m working on a preview mode for evince available through the command line. I’ve added other command line options like –fullscreen and –presentation (fixes bug #317031) too.

There are still some problems. Right now, the printing dialog is closed when you click on preview and evince is launched. Matthias Clasen has proposed to add a print button in evince toolbar so that the user just click on it and the document is sent to the printer. IMO this approach has several problems: first of all, you can’t go back and change the print settings because the print dialog has disappeared. In addition, we have to provide a way to send the print settings from the dialog to evince which is not so easy to do. I think all of these problems could be solved if we don’t close the print dialog when clicking on preview and not allowing to print from evince when it’s in preview mode. What do you think?

GNOME System Tools

The new dbus stuff is in cvs head now!!! I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ll do it as soon as I finish the exams. Garnacho has open a wiki page where he explains how to get it working.

Work (GSyC/Libresoft)

After some time without hacking because of the exams I’ve been working again on my project (DeTraS). I’m happy with the progress 🙂

by carlos garcia campos

Evince attachments

Attachments support is a PDF feature that is not known by many people. However, it’s a nice feature and very useful. You can add any kind of file to a PDF document as an attachment. For example, if you are writing a programming document, you could attach the source code of your examples to the document instead of making a tgz with all of the files (the document itself and the examples).

I thought it could be a funny hack for evince, and I decided to implement it. Finally it has been a really funny hack :-). AFAIK evince is the only free PDF viewer that supports attachments right now. Here is the screenshot:

A PDF document with attachments in evince
A PDF document with attachments in evince

XGN

This weekend I will be, one year more, at XGN in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain). Personally, the best thing about this party is the opportunity to meet again with all of my friends from linups.

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

Busy Busy Busy!

Yeah, I’m even more busy than when I was studying for the exams. But at least I’m doing funny things right now 🙂

Zaragoza

The GNOME meeting that took place in Zaragoza was really nice, specially thanks to dexem for the organization. We could talk about the book of GNOME Hispano, GNOME System Tools and since the whole buoh team was there, we also could work on the buoh for a while.

But everything wasn’t work, the night in the RNR bars of Zaragoza was pretty funny!

GNOME Hispano book

As I promised, I’ve started to write in the book, although I haven’t committed anything yet. I hope I can commit something soon.

Evince

I love selection feature of evince! I’ve been working in some improvements like allowing drag and drop of text selected.

Buoh

Buoh, the online comics reader for GNOME Desktop, is very close to a first public release! Zioma is writing a spinner based on the ephy code for providing a better feedback when loading a comic. Steve-o has done a great work getting the first publication date for each comic in order to allow going to the first one.

GNOME System Tools

I know garnacho needs help with the new gst architecture if we want to have it ready for GNOME 2.14. I hope I can start helping soon . . .

by carlos garcia campos

A month without writing anything

I’ve been very busy the last days and lots of things have been happened.

GNOME

My paper for the II GUADEC Hispana was accepted. I’m going to talk about the desktop integration in GNOME, I hope the talk will be interesting for the people. The schedule is available in the GUADEC-ES website yet

Interesting discussion about GNOME and fun started by Edd Dumbill on Planet GNOME.

Evince is more and more fast and useful, and it’s the best rated application in gnomefiles right now. Jrb has added support for continuous and dual scrolling, one of the most requested features that in addition I think make the difference with other pdf/ps viewers.

University

Many works to do . . . It’s the moment to be focused only in uni stuff. There is only one month until the exams

No Software Patents: There were a protest in most of the spanish universities and of course in the URJC too. There are photos of the event in the ACM website. There are also photos and comments in the steve-o’s blog.

Basketball

Today, I’m going to play the last game of the 2004-2005 season for me. There is another one in two weeks, but I’ll be at GUADEC-ES then. I’m a little bit sad because the league is over, but in the other hand, I’m very happy remembering all of the games played.

The next Friday, there will be a 3 vs 3 championship in my uni (URJC). I already have a team 🙂 with steve-o and gabi. I’m sure it will be very funny