Gutsy: OpenOffice thumbnails transparent

[trollord]

On Gutsy 28.8.2007:

OpenOffice document thumbnails on desktop are transparent. I will attach screenshot. I don't believe this is what they are intended to look like.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

The screenshot is missing.

[trollord (trollenlord)]

Interesting. I did upload it. Ah well, retrying.

[trollord (trollenlord)]

The documents were made using Windows version of OpenOffice, 2.2.1 I guess. I downloaded them from elsewhere and they came up like that. After editing them with the development version that is included in Gutsy and saving them they have looked like they should (have proper "page" background in the thumbnail).

It seems to be reproductable using current versions, but I can not send the samples (they are CVs and applications of a friend, I was proofreading them to help..) that seem to be doing it.

[Bruce van der Kooij (brucevdk)]

I didn't know Gutsy included a thumbnailer for OpenDocument files. Anwyays, it looks to me like this is actually intended behavior. OpenOffice.org by default uses "No fill" as the background color, meaning transparency. The actual thumbnail in the archive (that is Thumbnails/thumbnail.png) is also transparent.

[KillerKiwi (killerkiwi2005)]

It might be intended for OOo but it look weird on your desktop....

Maybe default the image background to the desktop background color?

[Bruce van der Kooij (brucevdk)]

What package is supposed to provide thumbnailing for OpenDocument documents? I know there's a couple of scripts floating around, but those aren't in the repository. I'd be willing to provide a patch to default to a white background when transparent if people prefer this.

[Christian Niemeyer (christian-niemeyer)]

Hi!

I was quiet suprised when suddenly I saw odt-thumbnails in my document folder. Reinstalling on another system I was not able to reproduce this behaviour at first.

I figured out, that Tracker is responsible for making the thumbnails of odt. files. But, I guess, you must run "tracker-preferences" first (as non-root user). There on the Files tab you should check the entry "Generate thumbnails". After that wait for a while, maybe this will take effect at least after the next reboot or the next day. So, there's no script or anything.

So I imported the .thumbnail/normal-folder into F-Spot and selected a preview of an odt-File. With <Ctrl>+I F-Spot shows meta data. It says:
CreatorTool: tracker thumbnail factory
Selecting another thumbnail file (this time of a .pdf-file) it says:
Creator Tool: GNOME::ThumbnailFactory
(you also can check these by "xxd image.png" xxd makes a hexdump and shows information included in it.

Ok, so it's tracker. Thumbnails generated for .pdf files are well done, they even have a small black border and have no opacity/tranparency. The odt.thumbnails have a) no border b) are transparent.

The binary responsible for the odt-thumbnails is:
/usr/bin/tracker-thumbnailer
from the package "tracker".

I searched for any options or preferences about how to generate these thumbnails. tracker-thumbnailer --help does not exist. and the manpage to tracker-thumbnailer offers no further options. In gconf-editor I either found any options for tracker.

Anyone an idea how to change this behaviour? The out-of-the-box thumbnailing for odt-files with tracker is great. It's quite annoyingly though, e.g. when you have a non-solid-white background, then it's hard to see these thumbnails in nautilus.

I append 2 screenshots, you can see the odt-thumbnails and the pdf-thumbnails, and the problem when a non-solid or darker background is set.

Regards,
Chris

PS: Running gutsy 7.10 on a clean install.

[Christian Niemeyer (christian-niemeyer)]

So and here's the second screenshot with a different background set.

EDIT: Above the correct name of the thumbnail folder must be ~/.thumbnails/normal

[Christian Niemeyer (christian-niemeyer)]

sorry for triple posting.

Here's a workaround: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76566
There it's also said, that OOo2 makes automatically saves thumbnails into the document-files. But I guess what we see in nautilus is from tracker.

Launchpad tells me that "tracker" uses Gnome-Bug-Tracker:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/

We should make a bug report to:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=tracker

Can someone link this together?

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

I can't see how this is related to tracker at all, could you explain it better?

As far as I know, tracker doesn't make thumbnails for nautilus.

[Bruce van der Kooij (brucevdk)]

In reply to comment #7:
"Anyone an idea how to change this behaviour? The out-of-the-box thumbnailing for odt-files with tracker is great. It's quite annoyingly though, e.g. when you have a non-solid-white background, then it's hard to see these thumbnails in nautilus."

See below. They simply take the thumbnail contained in the OpenDocument file itself (inside the archive) without any editing, apart from resizing it with ImageMagick's `convert` utility. Also I couldn't find the right command-line arguments to properly fill the background color. `-color white -opaque none` comes close, but has some odd effects (I didn't look very long though).

See: http://imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#png_www

In reply to comment #10:
"As far as I know, tracker doesn't make thumbnails for nautilus."

The manpage for tracker-thumbnailer says: "tracker-thumbnailer takes an image file as input and produces a thumbnail which is compliant to the freedesktop.org thumbnail specification."

And the source for tracker-thumbnailer has:

thumbnails_dir = g_build_filename (g_get_home_dir(), ".thumbnails", NULL);

See http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/tracker/trunk/src/tracker-thumbnailer/

And there's a thumbnailer for OpenDocument files, see: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/tracker/trunk/thumbnailers/application/

Try:
$ tracker-thumbnailer "OpenDocument Text.odt" application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text normal

Where "Opendocument Text.odt" is obviously an existing OpenDocument Text document in the working directory.

[Bruce van der Kooij (brucevdk)]

Here's a version of the tracker thumbnailer written in Python which uses the Python Imaging Library (PIL) to modify the background color to white (works for all ODF types). It's quite similar to the one presented in the Ubuntu Forums earlier (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76566), but that one didn't change the background color so had the same transparency issue.

This could replace the Tracker version but would (I assume) bring in some unwanted dependencies (Python, PIL etc.). Is there a separate thumbnailer package such as thunar-thumbnailers?

Also the shadow effect on PDF thumbnails seems to be generated by evince-thumbnailer (evince-thumbnailer -s 128 test.pdf test.png). I didn't replicate this.

[Jonathan Ernst (jonathan.ernst)]

same here in jaunty, having pdf and odt files on the desktop looks really strange (as pdf files have a white background)

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find.