Bug#269403: [moz-bonobo-list] Bug#269403: mozilla-bonobo: can only see the first page of a PDF file

[Christian Glodt]

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 11:52, Laurent Bonnaud wrote:
> Package: mozilla-bonobo
> Version: 0.4.1-2
> Severity: important
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> in mozilla and galeon, when I click on any PDF file the first page of
> the document is correctly displayed by mozilla-bonobo.  Unfortunately
> I cannot view any other pages.  I cannot zoom the display either.
> Needless to say most documents are therefore unreadable.  

As you may know, mozilla-bonobo uses components that are provided
by other packages. These components can be used in two different
ways:

- As simple embedded viewers, with no toolbar or menu.

- With a menu and/or toolbar that needs to be merged with the host
  application's menu/toolbar.

Currently, mozilla-bonobo is designed to use the components in the
first way. This is because adding a component's menu/toolbar to a
browser window would lead to an inconsistent user interface. Imagine
having a second menubar in your browser window. That's not what I
would want as a user interface.

It may be possible to do something elegant, like merging a subset
of the actions of a component's menu/toolbar with the browser's
menu/toolbar. But that would need support from the browser, and
it would probably be quite hard to do.

Since bonobo is not getting much use in Gnome, I doubt many components
would even work if used that way. Also, I imagine bonobo will eventually
be replaced by a DBUS-based technology, so I'm not keen on investing
much time in exploring its most obscure features.

The PDF viewer component is usually gpdf. As a workaround, you can
zoom with the '+' and '-' keys on the numeric keypad, and you can
change pages with the 'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keys. It does also
scroll when you use the cursor keys.

> This bug
> would even deserve a "grave" severity since it breaks PDF viewing in
> other packages that work fine when mozilla-bonobo is not installed.

I'm not quite following here. Do you mean the acrobat reader plugin?
Please explain how mozilla-bonobo breaks other packages (and which
ones).

> In the mean time before this bug is fixed, you could perhaps add a
> warning in the package description.  For instance
> /usr/share/doc/mozilla-bonobo/README contains this warning:
> 
> *** This is alpha-quality software *** Use at your own risk ***

Maybe it would help if I added the gpdf workaround to the README,
along with an explanation of why things are the way they are.

Cheers,

Christian Glodt