You may be interested in Epdfview[1], a lightweight PDF viewer based on Poppler and GTK. I use it all the time on my GNU/Linux system. It does not depend on Gnome or KDE, in contrast to most of the other GNU programs on your list. Please consider adding it to your list.
Regards,
Jeremy Henty
Hi Jeremy,
thanks for your feedback.
I am also interested in epdfview, and use it from time to time.
But epdfview lacks some features that the other readers have (filling in formula-data).
Conclusion: We may add it in the future, but not for now.
Greetings
HennR
Jeremy Henty schrieb:
You may be interested in Epdfview[1], a lightweight PDF viewer based on Poppler and GTK. I use it all the time on my GNU/Linux system. It does not depend on Gnome or KDE, in contrast to most of the other GNU programs on your list. Please consider adding it to your list.
Regards,
Jeremy Henty
Other readers listed don't provide the named feature either.
I have spoken with mk. We should develop a policy, which readers we recommend for "average users" but we should not exclude certain readers on a random basis.
More on that later, from mk.
Greetings Hannes
Am Dienstag, 3. Februar 2009 15:08:45 schrieb HennR:
Hi Jeremy,
thanks for your feedback.
I am also interested in epdfview, and use it from time to time.
But epdfview lacks some features that the other readers have (filling in formula-data).
Conclusion: We may add it in the future, but not for now.
Greetings
HennR
Jeremy Henty schrieb:
You may be interested in Epdfview[1], a lightweight PDF viewer based on Poppler and GTK. I use it all the time on my GNU/Linux system. It does not depend on Gnome or KDE, in contrast to most of the other GNU programs on your list. Please consider adding it to your list.
Regards,
Jeremy Henty
Pdfreaders mailing list Pdfreaders@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/pdfreaders
Hi Hannes, Hi Henner, Hi all,
* Hannes Hauswedell hannes@fsfe.org [2009-02-03 15:25:25 +0100]:
Other readers listed don't provide the named feature either.
I have spoken with mk. We should develop a policy, which readers we recommend for "average users" but we should not exclude certain readers on a random basis.
More on that later, from mk.
I spoke with Hannes and Henner on that subject. What do you think about the following proposal. We list all PDF readers, which are Free Software and "actively maintained". How Free Software is defined should be know to all here. For "Actively mainted" we should find a good criteria (e.g. answeres on bug reports, latest commits in the past year...).
On the list we remove the footnote "[2] Additional software may be required to use this program." But we add a paragraph that for "normal users" (find a better term) the pdfreaders team suggest the software which has a green background in the table. We add that green background for the most convinient readers like evience + okular for Free operating systems, skim for MacOSx, and sumatrapdf for Windows. And things like okular for windows, yap, etc. will not get that green background.
Would that be a good policy?
Best wishes, Matthias
On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 17:09 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
I spoke with Hannes and Henner on that subject. What do you think about the following proposal. We list all PDF readers, which are Free Software and "actively maintained". How Free Software is defined should be know to all here. For "Actively mainted" we should find a good criteria (e.g. answeres on bug reports, latest commits in the past year...).
I more or less agree with this. There are some potential issues though:
* There might be a case where a good PDF viewer is available and working just fine, but not actively maintained at the moment. The current version of Xpdf was released in 2007 for instance
* There might be actively maintained Free Software that can read PDF files, but does not have just that as its primary function. It may seem that this is the case with MuPDF: "MuPDF is a PDF parser that reads PDF files and creates Fitz trees."
On the list we remove the footnote "[2] Additional software may be required to use this program." But we add a paragraph that for "normal users" (find a better term) the pdfreaders team suggest the software which has a green background in the table. We add that green background for the most convinient readers like evience + okular for Free operating systems, skim for MacOSx, and sumatrapdf for Windows. And things like okular for windows, yap, etc. will not get that green background.
Something along those lines sounds good. I also might suggest using "most popular" as opposed to "for normal users" as the criterium for choosing which readers to "recommend". This will most likely end up being the "most convenient" readers anyway.
all the best, /Stian
Stian Rødven Eide stian@fsfeurope.org writes:
On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 17:09 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote: I more or less agree with this. There are some potential issues though:
- There might be a case where a good PDF viewer is available and working
just fine, but not actively maintained at the moment. The current version of Xpdf was released in 2007 for instance
I don't think we should recommand and link to unmaintained software. I don't see any PDF reader which is really complete so unmaintained can never be a good status.
Even if we consider that there might exist an complete free PDF reader than unmaintained would still be bad because in the best case this would mean no bug fixes and in the worst case this would mean no security fixes.
As for xpdf, the date of the latest release is not necessarily an indicator if a program is maintained or not. The main question is: Does an development team exist? Does it is active? Does bugreports get noted, etc. So even if the last release was 2007 xpdf can still be maintained (but i haven't checked it).
- There might be actively maintained Free Software that can read PDF
files, but does not have just that as its primary function. It may seem that this is the case with MuPDF: "MuPDF is a PDF parser that reads PDF files and creates Fitz trees."
But if it is actively maintained you can expect that in the (near) future it will have more features. Of course if it is not the (primary) function to read PDF files than it is probably not a candidate for pdfreaders.org because this site is especially about PDF _readers_.
Something along those lines sounds good. I also might suggest using "most popular" as opposed to "for normal users" as the criterium for choosing which readers to "recommend". This will most likely end up being the "most convenient" readers anyway.
Than i would use "most convenient" from the beginning. I like this more than "most popular" also you would have to explain how you measured the popularity.
But at the moment i like the catchy "end-user ready".
best wishes, Björn
Bjoern Schiessle schiessle@fsfe.org writes:
As for xpdf, the date of the latest release is not necessarily an indicator if a program is maintained or not. The main question is: Does an development team exist? Does it is active? Does bugreports get noted, etc. So even if the last release was 2007 xpdf can still be maintained (but i haven't checked it).
BTW: An good indicator if a program is maintained, at least for free operating systems, is if all (most) distributions packetise it. Because they will probably not ship buggy or dangerous software so even if upstream is not avtive the software is probably maintained by the distributions.
best wishes, Björn
Conclusion:
* Reader has to be free (ORLY?)
* Reader should be under development (last SVN update <=1,5 years?)
* Reader could have proprietary dependencies like libs, or not?
In my opinion Skim is ok, as the libs are installed in any case if you use Mac OS. If you would have to install proprietary software to be able to use a reader, then we should deny it.
Is that OK for everybody?
HennR
On Friday 06 February 2009 17:04:18 HennR wrote:
Conclusion:
Reader has to be free (ORLY?)
Reader should be under development (last SVN update <=1,5 years?)
Reader could have proprietary dependencies like libs, or not?
In my opinion Skim is ok, as the libs are installed in any case if you use Mac OS. If you would have to install proprietary software to be able to use a reader, then we should deny it.
Is that OK for everybody?
Fine with me.
all the best, /Stian
Hi Georg,
* HennR hennr@fsfe.org [2009-02-06 17:04:18 +0100]:
Conclusion:
Reader has to be free (ORLY?)
Reader should be under development (last SVN update <=1,5 years?)
Reader could have proprietary dependencies like libs, or not?
In my opinion Skim is ok, as the libs are installed in any case if you use Mac OS. If you would have to install proprietary software to be able to use a reader, then we should deny it.
Is that OK for everybody?
I think that is ok. Do you also think that is fine? If you think it needs discussion can you discuss that with team@ and this list?
Best wishes, Matthias
Hi all,
On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 18:28:46 +0100 Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org wrote:
mk> I think that is ok. Do you also think that is fine? If you think it mk> needs discussion can you discuss that with team@ and this list?
Considering that FSFE will be held responsible by the public to some extent for any policy it would adopt on this campaign, I think that it would be reasonable to run the result of any discussion past team along in the usual way (using team-decisions), which should be handled by the Fellowship coordinator.
My personal comments on the policy would be that dependencies to operating systems that are proprietary are not good, but seem acceptable, as this will bring at least some additional freedom to the user.
Using proprietary languages/technologies (e.g. .NET) is acceptable if a Free Software implementation of that technology exists (e.g. Mono) and the reader is known to work with that.
Dependencies on proprietary libraries is therefore an issue that depends whether or not those libraries can reasonably be considered part of the operating system libraries.
If that is the case, I think we can accept it.
If they need to be installed extra, I think it is not okay.
Regards, Georg
From HennR, 2009-02-06:
Conclusion:
Reader has to be free (ORLY?)
Reader should be under development (last SVN update <=1,5 years?)
Reader could have proprietary dependencies like libs, or not?
In accordance with Georg's suggestion, I've submitted the issue to team- decisions@. I forgot to CC this list on the mail, but will keep you updated.
all the best, /Stian
Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org writes:
I spoke with Hannes and Henner on that subject. What do you think about the following proposal. We list all PDF readers, which are Free Software and "actively maintained". How Free Software is defined should be know to all here. For "Actively mainted" we should find a good criteria (e.g. answeres on bug reports, latest commits in the past year...).
sounds good.
On the list we remove the footnote "[2] Additional software may be required to use this program." But we add a paragraph that for "normal users" (find a better term) the pdfreaders team suggest the software which has a green background in the table. We add that green background for the most convinient readers like evience + okular for Free operating systems, skim for MacOSx, and sumatrapdf for Windows. And things like okular for windows, yap, etc. will not get that green background.
also sounds good.
I like the idea, both the policy and the green background for recommended readers.
What about "end-user" as an alternative for "normal users". So the readers with the green background would be "end-user ready".
best wishes, Björn