Re: gnome dvi viewer

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 07:45, Jaka Mocnik wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 10:20, Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> > FYI, at one point I was told by a GGV developer that DVI support was
> > planned. (Personally, I think extending GGV would be the best way to
> > integrate things.)
> If you were told that by me (although I "do not recollect" it, it must
> have been a long time ago), then I must admit I was lying ;)
> 
> There are currently no plans to integrate native dvi viewing in ggv. It
> would require a substantial rewrite of ggv as it is implemented now
> (along the lines of abstracting the document interface and making PS and
> DVI two different backends of that one interface). If anyone is
> interested in doing this, I can offer some help (actually the 1.99.x
> code is much cleaner and easier to comprehend than that of 1.1.x), but I
> really don't have time for it - mind you, I still haven't made the 2.0.0
> release ;>.
> 
> On the other hand, a simpler solution is to implement gdvi as a bonobo
> control (perhaps it is implemented in such a manner already, I haven't
> looked at the sources) - then it would be easy to make ggv shell display
> that control instead of the ggv one. And nautilus would be able to use
> that control as well.

The DVI renderer is not implemented as a bonobo control.  It is
implemented as a GtkWidget, which makes it not too difficult to embed
into other applications.  However, I would agree that it's best to do
this with bonobo.  That way, a DVI file can be viewed easily inside of
ggv, Nautilus, Evolution, Gnumeric, etc.  However, it's probably easiest
to develop a bonobo control in the context of an application whose only
purpose is to use that control, so a stand-alone DVI viewer will still
be useful, at least for development purposes.

On the flip side, the original author doesn't seem to have implemented
viewing of embedded PostScript with \special.  Thus, in order to make a
really useful DVI viewer, we'll have to have a PostScript renderer.  So
is ggv implemented as a bonobo control?

--shaunm

> 
> You are of course free to do a "dvips some.dvi -o some.ps; ggv some.ps"
> to use ggv as your dvi viewer...
> 
> regards,
> 	jaKa