elementaryzed PDF viewer [$5]

[ender]

elementary OS needs to ship all the default apps with a consistent look.
So you need to patch or modify PDF viewer or 'Document Viewer'.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

We're happy with Evince so far, though it could surely use a few UI tweaks. Recreating the same from scratch will definitely take much more effort than we can afford, so I'd prefer to tidy up Evince.

[John Miller (dohn)]

Hi,

I'm a long time C++ developer and longtime Linux user, but not very experienced with contributing to open source projects surrounding Ubuntu or Gnome.

I'd like to take upon the task of tweaking Evince to fit Elementary's design guidelines. What exactly would this consist of? From my view, the menu bar needs to be removed, the toolbar needs to be extended to make up for functionality that was only in the menu bar (although a fair amount of it will be trimmed), the interface needs to be tab-based, the chrome needs to be recolored and basically restyled slightly such as to meet the design specs, and the 'paging' effects in the actual document view must be reinvented such as to fully align with the rest of Elementary OS's design. I'll create a mockup and get it approved before doing anything.

To do this, there seem to be two practical options. One is to take Evince's existing C codebase and just modify that. I'm not sure how well this would work, given that it seems the language of choice for Elementary OS's apps is resoundingly Vala. Taking note of that observation, the other option would be to write a new document viewing UI on top of the core of Evince in Vala largely from scratch. Vala looks simple to adopt, and Evince's architecture appears to modularize the core functionality away from the UI.

My next question is how would something like this be maintained? Every time core parts of Evince change, the eOS document viewer (which I expect to call something like "Elementary Evince" in respect of the original authors) will need to have those changes merged. I'm not familiar with the processes of maintaining a fork like this, so any insight would be appreciated. I'm not very interested in doing anything that cannot have this sort of maintenance automated or, in the worst case, assumed by another member of the community.

Thanks guys - looking forward to getting started.

[swizzle (el-ferreira-deactivatedaccount)]

There is already a guy called Ramiro Algozino (you can find him on g+) working on an elementaryzed PDF viewer based on evince.

[Bui Thanh Nhan (nhanb)]

Looks like Ramiro Algozino has made good progress on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lLsPap3ZxY

[Ramiro Algozino (algozino)]

Hello there!

 I've stopped all the development on that project, I believe that Evince in Gnome 3.12 looks very "elementarish" and I don't feel that a separated project is still worthy.

See: http://worldofgnome.org/uploads/2013/03/evince.png

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

I'm going to change the status here to "Won't Fix" since Evince 3.14 seems to fit in just fine.