zathura - a PDF viewer

lpb612 · 2009-10-30 04:18:21

neldoreth wrote:

Since I am not using Gnome: Can you explain in a more detailed way, why the window size cannot be changed and why the full screen mode (which should "work", since I can resize the window) does not work? But anyway I know that there are a lot of things that has to be changed in zathura concerning the window itself and the scrollbars.

Before tonight, the application did not respect the geometry set in config.h. So usually a file was usually open with a size larger that that set in config.h. But now that seems to be have been corrected.

In Gnome, unless SHOW_SCROLLBARS is set to 1, the window size cannot be changed by mouse. Switching the application to full screen will hide the window borders but not maximize the window. Fortunately, now, with SHOW_SCROLLBARS set to 1, the window behaves as expected (size changeable and full screen can be switched to).

If I could make a feature request, please consider adding the mark feature (like in VIM) such that you can set a mark and jump to it by its single-letter label.

Thanks for the excellent work.

neldoreth · 2009-10-30 09:12:50

Hello,

OK, then it was just the common issue, where I have already wrote about:

so right now you have to (if you're not using a tiling window manager like dwm) stay with shown scrollbars. In my point of view I personally don't understand while with the "never"-policy the whole behaviour of the ScrolledWindow and not just the display of the scrollbars itself disappear

I guess, I will write that on the first post or on the website too; maybe its possible to find a suitable solution for that anyhow.

My point is that it is a poor choice for a default.

As far as I am concerned in vim those keybindings mean the following: ^B (scroll one backwards) ^F (one page forwards) - but thats why you can edit everything to your wishes.

If I could make a feature request, please consider adding the mark feature (like in VIM) such that you can set a mark and jump to it by its single-letter label.

OK, someone mentioned that before, so I already wrote that down.

Best regards

lpb612 · 2009-10-30 15:51:10

neldoreth: Thanks for the reply. A couple of more comments:

1. The index mode does not seem right. Open any document that does not have an index. Toggle index on and off a few times. The first time, the program tell you that the document does not have index. But further toggles will behave as if the document as an empty index -- the left index panel will show (which should not).

2. There should be a fit-width and fit-page option to "zoom", like in acrobat reader. This should be easy to introduce. And I have checked the previous comments -- it seems a feature not mentioned before.

3. Also, in the "continuous" scrolling mode, please consider allowing the bottom of a page to show on the upper part of the screen. Right now, the scrolling will stop if the bottom of a page is visible -- scrolling further will move on to the next page. This is the same as in Acrobat. But this is not good - because sometimes, I want to show the bottom part on upper screen -- for people in the backrow to see in a crowded classroom (for example). Allowing truly continuous scrolling would be good. (Take a look at the scrolling behavior of apvlv). It would involve more programming to render multiple pages at a time, as you have explained, though.

Best Regards - lpb612

Last edited by lpb612 (2009-10-30 16:01:16)

neldoreth · 2009-10-30 16:42:06

Hello,

lpb612 wrote:

1. The index mode does not seem right. Open any document that does not have an index. Toggle index on and off a few times. The first time, the program tell you that the document does not have index. But further toggles will behave as if the document as an empty index -- the left index panel will show (which should not).

OK, noted. Thank you.

lpb6122 wrote:

There should be a fit-width and fit-page option to "zoom", like in acrobat reader. This should be easy to introduce. And I have checked the previous comments -- it seems a feature not mentioned before.

Because its an feature that already has been implemented.

lpb6122 wrote:

3. Also, in the "continuous" scrolling mode, please consider allowing the bottom of a page to show on the upper part of the screen. Right now, the scrolling will stop if the bottom of a page is visible -- scrolling further will move on to the next page. This is the same as in Acrobat. But this is not good - because sometimes, I want to show the bottom part on upper screen -- for people in the backrow to see in a crowded classroom (for example). Allowing truly continuous scrolling would be good. (Take a look at the scrolling behavior of apvlv). It would involve more programming to render multiple pages at a time, as you have explained, though.

OK, I never thought about such an situation.

Best regards.

jt512 · 2009-10-30 17:12:20

neldoreth wrote:

My point is that it is a poor choice for a default.
As far as I am concerned in vim those keybindings mean the following: ^B (scroll one backwards) ^F (one page forwards) - but thats why you can edit everything to your wishes.

Your goal should be to emulate vim's efficiency, not it's exact key bindings. Vim's key bindings were chosen so that the most common tasks can be done with the minimum effort. In a text editor, the most common tasks (besides typing text) are moving the cursor within a line and between lines. Hence the key bindings for these tasks in vim are done with single keystrokes.

In a pdf viewer, however, the most common tasks are scrolling and changing pages. Hence the defaults for these ought not to require two hands (or 1-handed gymnastics) to perform.

Sure, anybody can remap your ^F and ^B to more sensible bindings, and a minority of users will. However, many others will just get annoyed and choose a different browser.

Jay

danvel · 2009-11-13 12:31:01

Hello, zathura is so nice, but aye have some troubles with compilling it. It shows so many errors like

zathura.c:784: warning: passing argument 1 of 'poppler_document_new_from_file' makes pointer from integer without a cast
/usr/include/poppler/glib/poppler-document.h:95: note: expected 'const char *' but argument is of type 'int'zathura.c:410: error: 'cairo_t' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:410: error: 'cairo' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:410: error: invalid operands to binary * (have 'struct Shortcut *' and 'struct Shortcut *')
zathura.c:410: error: 'struct <anonymous>' has no member named 'PDF'
zathura.c:410: error: request for member 'surface' in something not a structure or union
zathura.c:784: error: too many arguments to function 'poppler_document_new_from_file'

It might be coz the versions of gtk2 and poppler is newer than in deps, but aye dont know where to get an older ones
to check it.

neldoreth · 2009-11-13 12:48:12

Hello,

It seems that you do not have cairo installed.

Best regards

danvel · 2009-11-13 14:28:48

nope, all depends are installed, still wonder why it dont wan to compile
cairo 1.8.8-1 is installed a well as others.

here's another bunch of errors

zathura.c:1175: error: 'POPPLER_FORM_FIELD_BUTTON' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:1178: error: 'FALSE' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:1178: error: too many arguments to function 'poppler_form_field_button_set_state'
zathura.c:1180: error: 'TRUE' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:1180: error: too many arguments to function 'poppler_form_field_button_set_state'
zathura.c: In function 'cmd_info':
zathura.c:1208: error: 'struct <anonymous>' has no member named 'PDF'
zathura.c:1208: error: request for member 'document' in something not a structure or union
zathura.c:1211: error: 'gchar' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:1211: error: 'info' undeclared (first use in this function)
zathura.c:1211: error: invalid operands to binary * (have 'struct Shortcut *' and 'struct Shortcut *')

UPD:
That was stupid: aye forgot to install pkgconfig. Now everything's ok.

Last edited by danvel (2009-11-13 15:45:16)

Barrucadu · 2009-11-13 16:39:56

zathura.c:1211: error: 'gchar' undeclared (first use in this function)

Do you have glib2 installed?

edit: Ah

Last edited by Barrucadu (2009-11-13 16:40:17)

lpb612 · 2009-11-16 05:48:03

Nice to see some activities here again. I would like to make my request again - to add smooth (really continuous) scrolling. The current scrolling is the easiest to implement from the programming point of view, but not really user friendly. You scroll, starring at the bottom of the page, then suddenly it flips to another page - a visual shock.

I have taken a look at the code, trying to do it myself. Knowing nothing about GTK, Cairo, and poppler, I could not get the sense of the code. I know that the "draw()" function needs to be modified, but I don't know how. Can someone more capable take a look? Zathura is so nice, that it is nearly perfect. Other than the scrolling issue, my other wish is to remove the side scroll bar (at least in the full screen mode).

In terms of the speed, there is some slug time between displaying pages (depending on documents). Maybe some kind of page caching (like the past 10 viewed pages plus the next/previous page) can be implemented? I don't know how easy that is.

A lot of request, I know. Thanks for all the help. Even without the changes, zathura is quite usable now.

dw · 2009-11-23 12:08:11

hi, first of thanks for this wonderful pdf-viewer. I have one question, though. is it possible that the git-repository on your site is down? i can't seem to clone it....

neldoreth · 2009-11-24 18:10:23

dw wrote:

hi, first of thanks for this wonderful pdf-viewer. I have one question, though. is it possible that the git-repository on your site is down? i can't seem to clone it....

git clone git://neldoreth.net/zathura.git

Works without a problem.

Regards

fauno_ · 2009-11-26 13:58:00

feature request: can you add a way to customize the jump to next_page behaviour? like setting zathura to jump to next_page when right border is reached, instead of bottom (same for top and left, of course)

nagnatron · 2009-12-04 15:22:29

Excellent app. Thanks a lot for making it.

sajkr · 2009-12-15 18:54:03

Hello.
I propose a reverse video option. You can achieve it by xor-ing each pixel by 0x00FFFFFF before returning from draw(). cairo_image_surface_get_data() returns a pointer to the surface.
I already implemented this feature, but I'm not sure I'll have time to add it to the git version.

neldoreth · 2010-01-18 22:59:05

Hello,

Overall I just do not want to let this project and this thread die, so I wanted to give some information about the progress of the last few weeks,
where I had some time to continue developing on some parts of zathura. I have been able to fix some of the problems, but in the end I crashed
into some that I am not able to solve right now, but I will get into this a bit later.

First of all I began to add an statusbar to zathura to show the current document, the current page and the current buffer (I will explain it in just
a minute) in a much more beautiful and useable way. In addition I dropped the current notification system and replaced it with a one, that just
uses the already existing inputbar. Also widgets like the index of the document will replace the current view (the page) instead of complicating the
whole structure of the interface.

Furthermore it is now possible to use buffered commands like "25G" to jump to page number 25 or "gg" to jump to the end of the document. or
to use "zI" and "zO" to zoom in/out like it is implemented in vimperator. Those commands can be customized and added in an easy way in the
configuration file. Besides that I introduced so called "special commands" that are using a different identifier to ":", like "?" or "%" for searching
the document. These commands can be configured to be called on each input change (incremental search) or just after activating them. I also
rewrote the tab completion and added a possibility to complete over parameters, that is used for commands like "open" and file completion, or
"set" to tab over possible variables that can be set and so on. It also supports command abbreviations and command description and also
grouped parameters, that are not used currently. In addition input shortcuts can now be defined in the configuration file too like for the tab completion
or the command history, or the string manipulation function that just deletes the last written word in the inputbar.

Since I did not liked the GTK printing dialog nor to configure all printers in the configuration file, I wrote a new method based on lp/lpstat and the
new completion system: You are now able to complete over the available printers with tab and then specify the pages that should be printed.

And then I wanted to add pre-rendering to zathura, so all pages of the document are rendered in the background, so switching pages works more
fluently: So I introduced a render thread that gets called after changing the rotation or the zoom level. Even if it is working, it needs to much memory
and so more or less it is not doing its job, but I wanted it to use to support continious pages. I also introduced a search-thread which gets called
when you want to search for an item (also on incremental search), and thats when the problems come in: Even if I am locking I have lots of problems
with those threads concerning the synchronisation between the window redrawing (I experience some x window system errors like BadWindow) or some
segmentation faults in the g_slice_alloc and have no clue about solving this right now: Hints are very welcome.

Concerning continious pages (and normal mode) I guess I am going to just use a GtkBox where I add all pages, and if I want to use "single page view",
I will just hide all other pages, what will save me the reparenting problem if I will stick with the current structure. In addition I guess I will drop the pre-rendering
support if I do not find a suiteable solution for it and if it is really necessary.

I also have (I guess so) fixed the "hide scrollbar" scrolling behaviour, so the window should not resize if you are zooming the page in a floating environment and
I added some requests like the reverse video option.

I would be happy if you check out the "pdf" branch in the git repository and test the new stuff I have added; may you have an idea about the above problems and
I hope I will have time in february to release a new version of zathura.

Best regards

OrangeRoot1000 · 2010-01-25 16:38:11

I have to say I like aplv (sp) for a minimalist pdf viewer. It as a caveat uses Vim key bindings.

To be honest. Minimalism can take many forms. Running Zat.. I would have to run a viewer for every codec out there. KDE 4's Okular does just that for me. So I have one viewer for pics, pdfs, chm, djvu, and about 6 other things.

neldoreth · 2010-01-25 21:49:20

Hello,

OrangeRoot1000 wrote:

Running Zat.. I would have to run a viewer for every codec out there.

The point is that you do not have to run zathura.

OrangeRoot1000 wrote:

KDE 4's Okular does just that for me. So I have one viewer for pics, pdfs, chm, djvu, and about 6 other things.

I am happy for you that you have found a program that suits your needs best.

Best regards

milomouse · 2010-01-25 22:06:10

Hello. I hate to sound completely stupid by misinterpreting anything but I can't seem to clone anything. I had done an update yesterday and it worked fine but now it always "hangs" and fails. Do I have to do something special since you're testing/fixing things right now? If it's git related please let me know since I haven't been using it very long. Great program, by the way, been using it since the beginning.

neldoreth · 2010-01-26 12:31:25

Hello,

milomouse wrote:

Hello. I hate to sound completely stupid by misinterpreting anything but I can't seem to clone anything. I had done an update yesterday and it worked fine but now it always "hangs" and fails. Do I have to do something special since you're testing/fixing things right now? If it's git related please let me know since I haven't been using it very long. Great program, by the way, been using it since the beginning.

Thanks for letting me know, curiously the access for the daemon was not granted anymore, but it should work now again.

Please let me know, what you think about the pdf branch ("git checkout pdf").

Best regards

Last edited by neldoreth (2010-01-26 14:20:32)

milomouse · 2010-01-26 13:01:52

Alright, thanks. I'll try it again when I get back to my personal computer later on today.

Rockwolf · 2010-01-26 14:53:48

This is a very nice application. Thanks!

milomouse · 2010-01-27 11:38:17

I want to say that the changes you've made are fantastic. Even the defaults are what I tried to accomplish/change in the old config. Very nice. Although I've only been messing with it for about 20 minutes I wanted to spot out of a few things I've noticed.

1 ] One thing I've noticed is that when you start typing, say.. "ffff", it stays there, so when I press "G" it's "ffffG". I know it's waiting until it hits a found binding but if there's no binding for "f, ff, fff, ffff, etc" defined in the config I wonder if it would automatically clear/ESC. Like I have a binding for "fb" and I type "f" it would stay there but when I type "o" (making it "fo") it should clear since there's no binding starting with "fo". Just my opinion, may not be realistic.

2 ] Also, unless I'm missing something how do you backspace a character? I have to ESC the whole line if I want to remove a letter. It may be in the config so forgive me if I overlooked it. I'm still testing things out.

3 ] Continuous scrolling option? I may have also overlooked this too. As of right now when I have it zoomed in larger than the window and I scroll down to the bottom it stops, so I hit "shift+j" and it goes to the next page but it starts at the bottom of it.

4 ] This isn't necessary but I was wondering if there could be a ":help" command to show bindings. This may be difficult to implement, I don't know much about how it would grab the values as I'm not really familiar with C but this may be something for a stable release sometime on.

5 ] When I type :set revertvideo it segfaults. Here's the message I get (also tested on other pdfs) :

[1]    24218 segmentation fault  zathura Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours.pdf

And gdb output (I could upload valgrind too if you need that) :

Starting program: /var/abs/local/zathura-debug/src/zathura/zathura 
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007ffff7b02bc4 in strcmp () from /lib/libc.so.6

And here's the dependency versions I have installed:

poppler=0.12.2-1, poppler-glib=0.12.2-1, gtk2=2.18.5-1, cairo=1.8.8-1

Aside from these little nitpicks I really like the improvements implemented. Very smooth.

EDIT: Yes, I'm using "pdf" branch, just FYI.

Last edited by milomouse (2010-01-27 12:43:04)

raymboard · 2010-01-27 17:55:48

==> ERROR: One or more files did not pass the validity check!

barzam · 2010-01-27 17:57:03

Try the -git version, I installed it today after having the same error before.

Arch Linux

#76 2009-10-30 04:18:21

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#77 2009-10-30 09:12:50

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#78 2009-10-30 15:51:10

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#79 2009-10-30 16:42:06

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#80 2009-10-30 17:12:20

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#81 2009-11-13 12:31:01

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#82 2009-11-13 12:48:12

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#83 2009-11-13 14:28:48

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#84 2009-11-13 16:39:56

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#85 2009-11-16 05:48:03

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#86 2009-11-23 12:08:11

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#87 2009-11-24 18:10:23

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#88 2009-11-26 13:58:00

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#89 2009-12-04 15:22:29

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#90 2009-12-15 18:54:03

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#91 2010-01-18 22:59:05

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#92 2010-01-25 16:38:11

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#93 2010-01-25 21:49:20

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#94 2010-01-25 22:06:10

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#95 2010-01-26 12:31:25

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#96 2010-01-26 13:01:52

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#97 2010-01-26 14:53:48

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#98 2010-01-27 11:38:17

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#99 2010-01-27 17:55:48

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

#100 2010-01-27 17:57:03

Re: zathura - a PDF viewer

Board footer