Evince search not working after closing and re-opening the search toolbar

[Alberto Salmerón Moreno]

Binary package hint: evince

Evince's search toolbar works fine when opened for the first time. However, if the toolbar is closed with some text in it, when it's opened again the previously entered text appears but the search does not work.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Open a PDF document in Evince
2) Press Ctrl+F to open the search toolbar
3) Write a word known to be in the document
4) Search results appear next to the search buttons; previous and next buttons work as expected; pressing Intro moves to the next result
5) Press Esc to close the search toolbar
6) Press Ctrl+F to open the search toolbar again; the word entered in step 3 can be seen in the search field

Expected result:

7) Search results appear next to the search buttons; previous and next buttons work as expected; pressing Intro moves to the next result

Actual result:

7) Search results do not appear next to the search buttons; previous and next buttons do not work; pressing Intro does nothing
8) Typing again in the search field restarts the search

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed May 7 00:33:12 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: evince 2.22.1.1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
 LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-16-generic i686

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your report, confirming, I've seen a bug like this will look upstream. thanks again.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531956

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

this is fixed on intrepid now with evince 2.23.5, thanks.

[Christian Hudon (chrish)]

Is there a possibility of raising the priority of this bug and backporting this fix to the hardy LTS release? Basically, this bug makes search in PDF pretty much unusable. And I'm not the only one thinking that (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531956#c1, saying "This has a huge usability impact since the search as it’s currently implemented is broken.").

We're using the LTS releases, and the perspective of staying with broken search in PDF functionality for 1.5 more years does not fill me with a great deal of joy and happiness. ;-)

[Luke Orland (orluke)]

I found an easy workaround in Hardy. If you experience this bug, click on File, then select the document you are currently viewing. Evince will reload the doc, and focus the document at the same place with the same zoom level as before. You should be able to search for the same string again with Ctrl+F and Ctrl+G.

I agree that the fix should be applied to Hardy if possible, since it's supported for several more years.