zathura - a document viewer

hungrybox · 2012-07-19 05:13:41

mlq wrote:

Hello,
hungrybox wrote:
how does one open multiple documents with zathura? sorry if its documented somewhere, i wasnt able to find anything.
This just means that you can pass multiple documents as arguments to zathura when you run it from your command line.
Best regards

would you consider implementing something like vim's buffer system? As in multiple pdfs open at the same time but only one visible at a time, with commands to view next/prev. It would really be useful to have multiple pdfs open in the same zathura instance for tiling window manager users like myself.

lagoy117 · 2012-07-26 18:12:59

When viewing some pdfs the fit to height feature "a" ends up fitting to width and showing some of the next page. Here is a pdf in which it happens for me:
http://www.math.utk.edu/~msaum/papers/prestips.pdf

@ hungrybox:

hungrybox wrote:

mlq wrote:
Hello,
hungrybox wrote:
how does one open multiple documents with zathura? sorry if its documented somewhere, i wasnt able to find anything.
This just means that you can pass multiple documents as arguments to zathura when you run it from your command line.
Best regards
would you consider implementing something like vim's buffer system? As in multiple pdfs open at the same time but only one visible at a time, with commands to view next/prev. It would really be useful to have multiple pdfs open in the same zathura instance for tiling window manager users like myself.

What WM do you use? In awesome you can use <Mod4>m to make the current window maximized and use it again to go back to regular tiling. Not quite the same but it allows you to have multiple documents open and still view them full size.

daspostloch · 2012-07-30 21:23:26

Dear devs,

first of all a huge thanks and you're awesome for your work. I had checked out zathura very early in development, dropped it again and am now completely blown away by how fantastically it has developed. So, congrats for the great work.

If you're interested, I'd also have three feature requests:

one would be to allow for hiding the statusbar from startup on. Or, ideally/alternatively/also, remember its visibility for files that were seen before, like the position and zoom is being remembered - this matches the user behaviour to look how many pages there are in new files, but not needing this info for files one has already seen. Or yet another alternative/addon, to opt for only briefly blending in the page count when a scroll/navigate key is being used and the statusbar is hidden.

second, related to this is making the scrollbars toggle-able by keybinding (similar use case as with the statusbar).

third, as said above, tabbed/buffered pdfs (perhaps with toggle-able tab bar or something, but rather without than with a fixed such bar) would be just darling.

EDIT: also, maybe make sc_search fully mappable including the search direction. it seems to take BACKWARD/FORWARD as argument, which isn't passable from the config. maybe add that or switch to up/down or previous/next. in general, it would be great to generate a dummy default config from config.c .

Last edited by daspostloch (2012-07-31 13:28:33)

D. · 2012-08-08 20:21:40

lagoy117 wrote:

When viewing some pdfs the fit to height feature "a" ends up fitting to width and showing some of the next page. Here is a pdf in which it happens for me:
http://www.math.utk.edu/~msaum/papers/prestips.pdf

Is there a solution to this problem? This makes it impossible to use zathura for presentation purposes as I can't make it seem to fit height (in full screen). Strange thing is I seem to remember this problem didn't exist in earlier versions (though now I'm unsure of this of course).

spupy · 2012-08-14 12:48:38

Much thanks for the devs for this fine program. It's my go-to viewer while I compose LaTeX, as it fits the spirit of my editor of choice - vim.

I have a question, or a request perhaps. How technically difficult is it to preload pages? I tried some image-heavy PDFs - evince can load those pages faster than zathura. I don't know if it's due to preloading.

lagoy117 · 2012-08-15 17:43:16

D. wrote:

Is there a solution to this problem? This makes it impossible to use zathura for presentation purposes as I can't make it seem to fit height (in full screen). Strange thing is I seem to remember this problem didn't exist in earlier versions (though now I'm unsure of this of course).

As a workaround you can set the zoom factor manually to the exact number that fits the entire page. Then the scroll by page keys will work just like a regular presentation. For the example above I was able to find the correct zoom amount that fits the entire page precisely but I am not sure that this would be possible with every document.

lagoy117 · 2012-08-15 20:02:29

I have come up with a solution to the best fit issue. In shortcuts.c line 132 in sc_adjust_window is currently

if (total_width < total_height) {

which decides chooses between fitting to the page width or page height. Currently it fits to page height for a landscape document and page width for a portrait document.

An alternative way to determine how to best fit would be to change the line with

 if ((double)width/height > total_width/total_height ) {

which chooses fitting to page height/width based on the window and document size ratios. If the window's width/height ratio is greater than that of the document it fits to height, otherwise it will fit to width.
The effect is that the entire page will be shown no matter what. If the window is too skinny then some of the next page(s) will be shown. I think this makes more sense for best fit overall and it also fixes the presentation problem.
Also I think the results for a rotated document look o.k. with this change but it could be handled differently.

mlq · 2012-08-16 19:59:37

Hello,

Thanks for your support, but you should check out the latest source code (git repository / devel branch), because we've changed some things regarding sc_adjust_window.

Best regards

D. · 2012-08-17 06:07:30

I was using zathura from the repos, I just installed the AUR packages. It seems to work indeed. It actually seems to work how I remember it from about half a year ago, strange...
Thanks lagoy117 and mlq.

lagoy117 · 2012-08-17 14:42:02

That looks good. It has the same effect as what I did, although it is cleaner. On another note when building the manuals I would get an error with python3 because of the differences in how strings are defined. It worked fine with python2 though.

Keep up the good work!

mlq · 2012-08-17 16:08:15

lagoy117 wrote:

That looks good. It has the same effect as what I did, although it is cleaner. On another note when building the manuals I would get an error with python3 because of the differences in how strings are defined. It worked fine with python2 though.
Keep up the good work!

This has probably something to do with your rst2man installation.

lagoy117 · 2012-08-17 16:17:34

mlq wrote:

lagoy117 wrote:
That looks good. It has the same effect as what I did, although it is cleaner. On another note when building the manuals I would get an error with python3 because of the differences in how strings are defined. It worked fine with python2 though.
Keep up the good work!
This has probably something to do with your rst2man installation.

I figured that. Docutils is supposed to be compatible with python 3. Not sure why it wasn't working for me.

dontbugme · 2012-08-20 18:22:40

New mupdf version and again the zathura-mupdf plugin doesn't build

hungrybox · 2012-08-20 20:44:12

has there been any thought towards adding "buffered" pdfs to zathura, as mentioned by myself and daspostloch here:

daspostloch wrote:

third, as said above, tabbed/buffered pdfs (perhaps with toggle-able tab bar or something, but rather without than with a fixed such bar) would be just darling.

imo, this is the one thing zathura currently lacks. I think it would be a great feature

mallet · 2012-08-26 11:54:28

Zathura is great lightweight PDF reader. It is my main reader currently.

For further improvement, I suggest:
- To add a non-contiguous scrolling mode in which one sees only one (centered) page at a time. This was the only mode available in the past. Now it has completely disappeared. This is strange, so I might be missing an option. If you are to keep only one mode, keep current contiguous scrolling mode.
- To better define the keybindings for a PDF reader. The bindings are inspired by vim too much. Vim is not a PDF reader... so one should not blindly use its bindings. Half-page scrolling down with Space and half-page scrolling up with Backspace would be a good start.
- To add a presentation mode, but the non-contiguous scrolling mode (see first point) in fullscreen would just do that.

Thank you for the good work!

mallet · 2012-08-27 08:35:39

There is another issue I noticed with the version 0.2.0. In the titlebar, zathura displays the name of the file with its full path. Most of the time in the taskbar, I can only see the beginning of the full path, so that I do not see what file is actually opened. I think the old way was better: just printing the filename, without the path.

bsilbaugh · 2012-10-04 19:18:15

I'm using zathura 0.2.1 with the pdf-mupdf backend (installed from community). When I execute zathura I get an error saying that it was unable to initialize the database:

$ zathura --version
info: successfully loaded plugin /usr/lib/zathura/pdf.so
info: Using plain database backend.
error: Unable to initialize database. Bookmarks won't be available.
zathura 0.2.1
(plugin) pdf-mupdf (0.2.1) (/usr/lib/zathura/pdf.so)

Why can't zathura initialize it's own "plain database backend"? Is there some other database plugin that I need to install? I didn't see anything else available in community or AUR. I noticed that the zathura project page mentioned something about an optional sqlite backend--but it wasn't clear how to enable this.

I also noticed that zathura seems to jump to the beginning of a document when the document changes, instead of keeping it's current position or page. Could this be related to the lack of a functional database?

I also noticed that the zathura package doesn't include a default zathurarc. The zathurarc man page says that the default config should be /etc/zathurarc.

I appologize in advance if I've missed something obvious.

I think zathura has a lot of potential. I look forward to using it as my standard PDF viewer (especially when using LaTeX.)

mlq · 2012-10-04 19:51:32

Hello,

bsilbaugh wrote:

I'm using zathura 0.2.1 with the pdf-mupdf backend (installed from community). When I execute zathura I get an error saying that it was unable to initialize the database:

Is it possible that you have an older history file which is probably not compatible to the current one (It changed some time ago). So please try to delete the old one.

bsilbaugh wrote:

[...]mentioned something about an optional sqlite backend--but it wasn't clear how to enable this.

~/.config/zathura/zathurarc:

set database sqlite

bsilbaugh wrote:

I also noticed that the zathura package doesn't include a default zathurarc. The zathurarc man page says that the default config should be /etc/zathurarc.

It is the global rc file that will be read by zathura before the local configuration files are read. Since the default configuration is set 'by default' anyway, there is no need for that file to exist.

Best regards

bsilbaugh · 2012-10-04 20:49:15

Thank you for your prompt feedback

I installed zathura and zathura-pdf-mupdf for the first time today. So, I don't think it's possible for me to have obtained an old history file. Also, ~/.config/zathura was completely empty, and I didn't see any other dot files under my home directory that appeared to be related to zathura.

Anyways, I enabled the sqlite backend in zathurarc, and now it seems to be working! This also fixed the issue I was having with zathura returning to the beginning of a document when the file changed (e.g. recompiling the document from latex source).

I'll be sure to spread the word about your wonderful document viewer! Thank you.

mlq · 2012-10-04 21:10:37

Hello,

bsilbaugh wrote:

I installed zathura and zathura-pdf-mupdf for the first time today. So, I don't think it's possible for me to have obtained an old history file. Also, ~/.config/zathura was completely empty, and I didn't see any other dot files under my home directory that appeared to be related to zathura.

Sounds like your file is corrupted anyway; I have no clue what could have caused that.

bsilbaugh wrote:

I'll be sure to spread the word about your wonderful document viewer! Thank you.

Thanks and best regards

bsilbaugh · 2012-10-04 21:44:17

I just figured out what was causing the database/bookmark/history issue that I raised in my post earlier today: the directory ~/.local/share was owned by root instead of user. Let me elaborate. When running zathura as a user for the first time, zathura wants to create its history file and database file under ~/.local/share/zathura. However, this is impossible due to the permissions set on ~/.local/share.

Why did ~/.local/share have root permissions and not user? I'm not sure, but based on the files that were already in there, I suspect this directory was originally created by a Gnome application that I am no longer using. (I dropped Gnome a while back in favor of the i3 tiling window manager.)

Why did switching to the sqlite database appear to fix the problem? Because when I first tried running zathura with sqlite backend, sqlite spit out an error message saying that it could not access ~/.local/share, which clued me on to the permission error. At the time, it didn't occur to me that zathura also uses ~/.local/share/zathura to store its history file and "plain database".

mlq · 2012-10-04 21:52:21

Hello,

Thanks for letting us know what caused the problem. I doubt that this is a problem issued by zathura itself, but rather with your previous settings. I don't know why switching to sqlite should have fixed it since there is no way it saved and restore the position values.

Best regards

Last edited by mlq (2012-10-04 21:56:02)

bsilbaugh · 2012-10-04 22:17:20

mlq wrote:

I don't know why switching to sqlite should have fixed it since there is no way it saved and restore the position values.

Sqlite didn't fix the problem. Sqlite simply gave me a more informative error message that allowed me to figure out the permission error. Only after fixing the permission error did running zathura with sqlite work. At the time, however, I didn't realize that zathura was also trying to use ~/.local/share/zathura for its history file (and plain database file if sqlite is not used). So, I incorrectly concluded that switching to sqlite fixed the problem. It wasn't until later in the day that I came to realize what had actually happened.

bsilbaugh · 2012-10-04 22:28:46

mlq wrote:

I doubt that this is a problem issued by zathura itself, but rather with your previous settings.

I agree. If zathura was run on a "clean" home directory, this error probably wouldn't have happened.

The only improvement that I might suggest is to first check if zathura has write access to ~/.local/share before attempting to create ~/.local/share/zathura. This would enable you to catch silly permission errors like this and/or inform the user of an unexpected access issue with ~/.local/share.

mlq · 2012-10-04 22:53:15

Hello,

bsilbaugh wrote:

mlq wrote:
I doubt that this is a problem issued by zathura itself, but rather with your previous settings.
I agree. If zathura was run on a "clean" home directory, this error probably wouldn't have happened.
The only improvement that I might suggest is to first check if zathura has write access to ~/.local/share before attempting to create ~/.local/share/zathura. This would enable you to catch silly permission errors like this and/or inform the user of an unexpected access issue with ~/.local/share.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've provided a patch to the develop branch which prints out an error message if those directories could not be created.

Best regards

Arch Linux

#276 2012-07-19 05:13:41

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#277 2012-07-26 18:12:59

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#278 2012-07-30 21:23:26

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#279 2012-08-08 20:21:40

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#280 2012-08-14 12:48:38

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#281 2012-08-15 17:43:16

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#282 2012-08-15 20:02:29

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#283 2012-08-16 19:59:37

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#284 2012-08-17 06:07:30

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#285 2012-08-17 14:42:02

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#286 2012-08-17 16:08:15

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#287 2012-08-17 16:17:34

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#288 2012-08-20 18:22:40

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#289 2012-08-20 20:44:12

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#290 2012-08-26 11:54:28

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#291 2012-08-27 08:35:39

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#292 2012-10-04 19:18:15

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#293 2012-10-04 19:51:32

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#294 2012-10-04 20:49:15

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#295 2012-10-04 21:10:37

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#296 2012-10-04 21:44:17

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#297 2012-10-04 21:52:21

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#298 2012-10-04 22:17:20

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#299 2012-10-04 22:28:46

Re: zathura - a document viewer

#300 2012-10-04 22:53:15

Re: zathura - a document viewer

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