Hey, I hadn't expected this to garner so much interest! Instead of replying to each message separately, I'll try to summarize a few things into this message. First of all, this thread doesn't have anything to do with GNOME Books. It's a separate application and doesn't have any Online Accounts integration whatsoever. Books shares the gnome-documents Git repository with GNOME Documents, and that's all. I can't even find it in gnome-build-meta, which is again a separate discussion: [rishi@kolache gnome-build-meta]$ git grep gnome-books [rishi@kolache gnome-build-meta]$ Second, "evince" is a lot of different things. It could mean: * everything that's in evince.git * the libevdocument3.so.4 and libevview3.so.3 APIs * /usr/bin/evince - the thing that opens files from Nautilus * /usr/bin/evince-previewer - this is used for the GTK print preview, as Emmanuele pointed out, and has NoDisplay=true * /usr/bin/evince-thumbnailer So, for some definition of "evince", GNOME Documents has a hard dependency on it. Ideally, the evince Git repository would be split to disambiguate some of these components as far upstream as possible, instead of relying on the various downstreams to get their packaging right. But that's also a separate discussion. :) It's true that GNOME Documents was conceived as a way to seamlessly access all files local and remote. In that sense, the Online Accounts integration is crucial for it. However, it has turned out to be more complicated than that. I also don't know how excited the GNOME designers are about GNOME Documents today. For various reasons, it doesn't stand any chance of adoption unless it can open files like /usr/bin/evince. "Documents" are also notoriously complicated, as compared to music, photos or videos. For example, if somebody is working on a thesis, then everything from graphs to PDFs to the textual LaTeX sources to screenshots can be considered a document. That's almost impossible to accommodate within the current reality of GNOME Documents. Lack of prior art. Every major OS out there has some equivalent of a music, photos or videos application, but I haven't come across anything like GNOME Documents with the possible exception of Google Documents. It's somewhat difficult to get people excited about, and is related to the above point. It's much easier to get people excited about music, photos or videos, because those are "fun", while documents are "boring". See how people go crazy about Google Photos at Google I/O, or Instagram, etc.. I don't see that many people go crazy about their PDF viewer. So, can it be saved? Maybe; if we are willing to diverge from it's original goals. If somebody (hey, Christopher) wants to give GNOME Documents a fresh lease of life, I think the addition of a file previewer has to be the first priority. GNOME Documents supports a lot more formats than Evince, so, done right, this could be an advantage. The widgets for rendering ebooks, Evince and LibreOffice formats would need some scrubbing for this. Exploiting the capabilities of the LOKView widget, plus some work on LibreOffice itself, could turn GNOME Documents into a sleek and stripped down word processor. That's another idea. Neither of these things require the Online Accounts integration, though. Cheers, Rishi _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list