print preview broken in non gnome environments (evince missing)

[jack_spratt]

Inkscape 0.46 Linux assumes that evince is installed on the machine that it is running on. This causes error messages when print preview is attempted: "Failed to execute child process "evince" (No such file or directory)".

This is a simple problem; perhaps evince could be listed as a dependency, or alternatively a more helpful error message could be displayed which would explaining the problem (many users will not know what "evince" is or means). It could say something like 'an external program is required to use the print preview function, please install evince'.

Ideally inkscape would be able to use KDE components to display print preview, as well as Gnome ones. I don't know how easy/possible this would be to implement.

This bug has been written up elsewhere, including bug #238609. However, it is not very well described there, and I think it is sufficiently important and easy to remedy that it merited a new bug submission (print preview is a very popular function on any graphics app).

[Luca Bruno (lucab)]

I'm not sure about it, but I think it is automatically handled by gtk-print widget, so this shouldn't be just inkscape-related but located in the toolkit.

[Constantin Berzan (exit3219)]

related bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/inkscape/+bug/243233

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Not an Inkscape issue: add or edit the "gtk-print-preview-command" property in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 to define a different preview command than the GTK+ default ("evince --unlink-tempfile --preview --print-settings %s %f").

reference:
<http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-print-preview-command>

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Duplicate of bug #263932?

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

@jack_spratt - Is this still an issue for you? I'm a GNOME user, so I can't easily test this.

[rdbrown0au (rdbrown)]

On Sat, 2010-11-20 at 12:00 +0000, Alex Valavanis wrote:
> @jack_spratt - Is this still an issue for you? I'm a GNOME user, so I
> can't easily test this.

Unfortunately so am I - I put the bug in for another LUG member who
asked about it on the luv.asn.au mailing list. I think it was fixed for
him when I last asked.

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

OK, thanks for letting us know. I'll close this report for now. If it turns out that the problem still exists in the latest inkscape package, we can reopen it.