Recent Features
| |||||||||||||
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentZacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentPosted Jul 4, 2012 18:11 UTC (Wed) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)In reply to: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment by nijhof Parent article: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
This should be easier now than it once was. A few years ago, I'd suggest that the following problematic pieces of software were "needed" to make a desktop Linux system usable; none of them shipped by default.
1. Flash
The current state of play is much better:
1. Still needed, but increasingly replaced by HTML5.
Summary: with reasonably careful choice of hardware, it's only really the flash player that we need to worry about.
(Log in to post comments)
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 4, 2012 18:22 UTC (Wed) by lindi (subscriber, #53135) [Link]
2. The Java plugin was not released as free software. Instead a new plugin was written mostly from scratch. There are unfortunately still sites that don't work with this new plugin and require the non-free one.
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 4, 2012 19:06 UTC (Wed) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]
> 8. Libfreetype6 (with bytecode interpreter).
> [...] > Free software, just upsets certain people who believe in patents!
I though those expired?
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 4, 2012 19:16 UTC (Wed) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link]
"4. Acrobat Reader
Evince/Okular replace it."
This is a curious statement. xpdf was around forever, and evince has no
I don't know for sure if the above also applies to Okular but I suspect
Would you like to join me in fixing this situation?
https://github.com/nobrowser/spadeful
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 4, 2012 19:26 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I don't know for sure if the above also applies to Okular but I suspect it does, with the obvious substitution of Qt for Gtk. Okular is really a pretty good PDF viewer. It used to be much more usable than Adobe Reader until Adobe Reader learned to re-load PDF files that had changed while being displayed. It does thumbnails, tables of contents and PDF forms. It does side-by-side display of pages. It's quite fast. It does selections as text or graphics. It does annotations. It has a fairly nice presentation mode. It will even read your document to you. It is in fact one of the more obvious reasons to use KDE in the first place. I use Okular every day and I'm pretty sure I haven't started Adobe Reader for three months or so – there's no need.
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 4, 2012 19:32 UTC (Wed) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link]
"Okular is really a pretty good PDF viewer."
How does it fare on the list of issues in my README?
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 4, 2012 20:30 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I'll see whether I can answer these. I have nothing to do with the program other than as a satisfied user, though. 1. Some very common actions (such as jumping to a particular page) have no keyboard bindings. As far as I can see most of the usual actions do have keyboard bindings (usually Ctrl+Something). »Go to page« is Ctrl+g.These can be customised by the user through a reasonably obvious interface. 2. What keyboard bindings there are consist of multiple modifier keys so relief from carpal-stressing mouse handling is slight. Most of the keyboard bindings use only one modifier (Ctrl). Again, these can be customised. 3. Making the preceding points worse, tab order in the interface is inconsistent or wrong. As far as I can see the tab order looks reasonable. 4. There is no browser-like breadcrumb feature - you cannot visit a different place in the document and then return with a simple click or keystroke. Okular does that. The »go back« feature is Ctrl+Shift+Left, so it's not a »simple« keystroke, but that could be changed in about 1 minute. One might also want to add a »go back« icon to the toolbar, which again is a fairly simple customisation. 5. (A pet issue of mine) When reading a document with bookmarks, the page view and the bookmark view are not synchronized. Meaning when you go to a spot by clicking on a bookmark, then do a couple of page-up or page-down in the page window, then you switch back to the bookmark window and hit a key, you're dumped to where you started. It looks like Okular fails that one, then. It does show you where you are in the bookmarks window, though, and tracks your position among the bookmarks if you move around in the page view. Only if you hit a key in the bookmark view that moves you relative to whichever bookmark was selected last.
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 13, 2012 21:26 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] And for a recent release of Evince:1. Some very common actions (such as jumping to a particular page) have no keyboard bindings."Go to page" is Ctrl+L. Most common actions seem to have keybindings (but "common" might be a personal thing). 2. What keyboard bindings there are consist of multiple modifier keys so relief from carpal-stressing mouse handling is slight. Seems like all shortcuts require at most 1 modifier. Also, if you have physical problems, I suggest you look into the a11y configuration for your distro/desktop (as I did recently). 3. Making the preceding points worse, tab order in the interface is inconsistent or wrong.This would require more information about what you consider wrong or inconsistent, as I don't use that much (probably best as a bug report). I assume tab order is also important for e.g. blind people who have to rely on a screen reader like Orca. 4. There is no browser-like breadcrumb feature - you cannot visit a different place in the document and then return with a simple click or keystroke.There is a button for that which you can add to the toolbar. I don't know about a keystroke. 5. (A pet issue of mine) When reading a document with bookmarks, the page view and the bookmark view are not synchronized. Meaning when you go to a spot by clicking on a bookmark, then do a couple of page-up or page-down in the page window, then you switch back to the bookmark window and hit a key, you're dumped to where you started.Seems like it doesn't update the bookmark view indeed. You might want to submit a feature request bug to improve this (or provide a patch yourself).
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 5, 2012 2:05 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
I find evince significantly more comfortable than Acrobat Reader, having in the past used the latter. Also, evince handles PDF forms, which last I checked xpdf did not.
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 6, 2012 12:07 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
Unfortunately evince sucks when it comes to creating or reading annotations (evince only supports the popup bubble annotation type of thingy), which requires me to go back to proprietary things for making/reading annotations.
evince and GNOME Posted Jul 5, 2012 18:45 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
The comment in your repository suggests that you don't want to use or work on evince due to its GNOME dependencies. However, evince can build without any GNOME components, using only GTK+.
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 19, 2012 10:41 UTC (Thu) by philomath (guest, #84172) [Link]
xpdf is slow as molasses compared to evince.
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment Posted Jul 5, 2012 12:56 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link]
> 4. Acrobat Reader
> Evince/Okular replace it.
I keep stumbling upon PDFs that Okular and Evince can't print while Acrobat does a very good job.
|
|||||||||||||