Re: Time to move GGV to the Attic?

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 16:02 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 16:22 +0200, Petr Tomasek wrote:
> > a) evince doesn't have the option of "automaticaly reload document
> > if changed"
> 
> There was a bug for this, but I think it was closed as you can't
> reliably tell when a changing file will stop being changed.   Pressing
> Control-R isn't too difficult though.

You can tell reliably:  inotify gives you IN_CLOSE_WRITE, which means
that a writable file was closed.

GGV is probably much less sophisticated, and probably uses the same
trick that GV used since time immemorial:  stat() the file being viewed
when you get an expose event, and reload it if st_mtime changed.  This
is really all you need for traditional users of TeX.

Evince's problems for viewing PostScript probably just amount to not
having reused much code from GGV.  Don't reinvent the wheel; just use
the magic of cut&paste, and it magically becomes maintained code in a
nicer package :)

> > Well the worst what evince does is actually not with postscript,
> > but with djvu. It is a) many times slower than djview (since evince
> > loads several pages at once while djview displays only what is needed)
> 
> The reading non-visible pages shouldn't have a noticable effect on the
> user, it should be doing that in the background.  File a bug.

Evince just needs some profiling, and some fine-tuning of its "render in
the background" machinery.  Even with PDFs it sometimes renders
thumbnails before rendering the big view.  For *me* this only seems to
happen with some PDFs; I'll file them as bugs as appropriate.

  Federico