Re: RFH: non-blocking desktop conforming viewer
On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am searching for a method to call a desktop conforming viewer
> that is blocking, i.e., that does not immediately return.
>
> Background: texdoc is the main tool to search for the waste amount
> of TeX documentation shipped. It supports also zipped (various
> formats) docs, but needs a viewer that is non-blocking, otherwise
> the temporary uncompressed file will hang around forever.
>
> Some time ago I switched from using "see" on Debian as the default
> texdoc viewer to "xdg-open" to make sure that proper selection
> of viewers are used (proper for the current desktop environment).
>
> Unfortunately, xdg-open, at least under gnome, is non-blocking, i.e.,
> immediately returns (in fact it is the underlying gvfs-open that
> returns immediately), which makes it impossible to use texdoc
> for searching and viewing compressed docs.
That sounds like an easy-to-implement extension in xdg-open.
>
> I see several options here:
> * forget about compressed documentation
> PDF since format 1.4 has internal compression, meaning that
> the other compression does not win a lot at all
> We could advise packagers to use dh_compress -X.pdf
I'm not sure, but wouldn't it be better to change dh_compress to do
the right thing and use the pdf format internal compression instead of
running gzip?
> * go back to see
> not my favorite
Fixing xdg-open instead seems favorable to me.
> * use a fixed list of viewers configured and force every user
> to change the viewer himself
> not my favorite
That doesn't really solve the problem, but only irritates users.
--
regards,
Reinhard
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