I only see a reference to this "Document Viewer" app in the Nautilus
"open as" dialog. There's nothing in the Applications menu and apropos
doesn't show anything. I'd like to know what the app is called and the
version.
Thanks, Sam & Georgi. I'm having a little PDF issue: ghostscript is
complaining but Document Viewer is not. I needed to know that app is for
debugging info. This is perfect.
I think you have lost sight of the user here, the average user would see
"evince" in a menu and have zero idea what it is and does. It is a meaningless
collections of vowels and consonants which are unrelated to the function. The
name of the application should be available, but not at the expense of something
useful to typical user.
document viewer (evince)
document viewer (xpdf)
for examples.
Having the document viewer in graphics is probably not optimal, but there isn't
a perfect place on the menus, maybe "office" is a bit more intuitive.
In a perfect world there would be a click to get a useful description off the
menu. Until then "about" is a good thing to remember.
I find that I learn about a bunch of obscurely named packages by reading the
packages released feed or newsgroup. The one paragraph description is enough to
decide if a package might be useful, and wherever they come from it would be
nice to have a package->description tool. Or maybe we do and I just haven't read
about it yet. ;-)
The correct thing to write is "Evince Document Viewer" (or any permutation
of this). And the freedesktop.org .desktop file standard says this should
be encoded as:
Name=Evince
GenericName=Document Viewer
Now somebody just needs to fix GNOME not to ignore GenericName, and
the .desktop files to use Name and GenericName as intended by the standard.
None of us have any idea what the average Fedora is. Making decisions
based on a fictional user is not useful. You need to worry about the
users here and now, that are represented.
Regardless of skill level, "document view" is not a useful search
term. Evince however is. Giving the user the ability to find
information, instead of assume it is more useful.
If you find a meaningless word in a menu more useful than a description of what
service it provides or problem is solves, good for you. Most people, in Fedora
or real life, would prefer that they know what's on the menu before ordering.
The average Fedorian is someone who has not studied every program in /usr/bin
just for the fun of it. And I admit that since I have other tools to view pdf
files (xpdf mainly) that I have never felt any curiosity about evince, nor would
I be likely to launch anything "just to see what happens."
I do. That's how I found out that XPDF was crap to use compared to
Evince, in most cases. Yet XPDF can view some PDF files that Evince
just showed a page not yet rendered.
I'm not keen on the idea of running random programs to find out what
they do. But I will try out alternatives, when I can see what a program
is supposed to be able to do.
Well, for a brief description of what a menu entry does, you can put
the mouse pointer on the entry and get a tool tip. On the other
hand, adding an option to the right-click menu to read more about
the application would be handy...
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Mikkel L. Ellertson
It seems like the mouse over hint would be the perfect place to
display the name of the application or package.
So for Archive Manager... "Create and modify an archiver. (aka file-roller)"
The Help -> About is not the answer. For instance, with File Roller,
it displays name of the app as "File Roller". Well that's nice, but
I'll bet dollars to donuts that the application binary isn't
/usr/bin/file\ roller. Nor is that the name of the package that
provides it. I had to open it up and use ps to figure out what the
binary is, and then use it to see what provided /usr/bin/file-roller.
So to me, I don't mind file-roller being called Archive Manager. But
I would like a way to see what I'm running before clicking on an icon
in a menu.
There is a way, a messy one, though... Drag a copy of the item off the
menu onto the desktop, read the desktop file in a text editor, look for
the command in it.
Sometimes you get really stupid descriptions in there. e.g. The tooltip
for Amaya says "edit the web".
Gee! Really? Can I delete microsoft.com?
The desktop files used to populate the menus should have the proper
application name in the right place, a terse description in the right
place, and more details in the right place. And a user menu option
ought to select what's shown. e.g. select to show Names in menu, select
to show terse info in the same menu item, select whether the longer
detailed pop-ups do pop up, with the default to do the obvious name and
terse description. e.g. "Amaya, web page editor."
Which brings up another thing that needs fixing: Meaningless application names :-).
I gave up on finding meaning in menu structures years ago. I finally learned
that the real way to find something is to grep the .desktop files under
/usr/share/applications :-).
Seconded! The menus should directly say "Evince document viewer," let
any pop-up additional help say something else (what it does). And it's
less than helpful that Evince is in the graphics menu, in Gnome. I
wouldn't ever expect to find a document viewer in a menu where I expect
to find things for dealing with JPEG files, and the like.
Other than a few well recognized brands like Firefox, generally end
users don't know or care about the application names and only the
functionality that it offers.
I disagree. I have at least three PDF viewers installed, any of which
could legitimately call itself "Document Viewer". Until the day comes
when there is Only One True Viewer, this is going to persist, and
obscuring the real name of the app helps no-one.
Also, if you are going to have a generic name, at lease have the
option of picking the application in the Preferred Application menu.
It is there for your WEB browser, mail reader, and a few others...
You're not the only one. KDE 4.2 currently has this Gnomish behavior
by default, and it's driving me crazy. I've been informed however,
that it will soon be fixed.
Switch to the classic menu (right-click, Switch to Classic menu style), then
you see the apps presented in a more sensible way. Kickoff just sucks.
(Disclaimer: That's my personal opinion and doesn't reflect the position of
the majority of the KDE SIG.)
Easy enough for those of us that know about it, not so good for anyone
else. Tell someone to load a page in Evince, and they can't find it.
Tell someone to load something in the document viewer, and you can get
an equally blank stare. They may not have it installed (what do you get
for yum install document viewer?), they may not find a document viewer
in the *graphics* menu, they may have more than one document viewer.
And, I seem to recall, that any time I customised a menu, my changes got
done with the next yum update to that application.
All in all, you present a poor argument compared against the system
having sensible settings in the first place.
I have been around Linux for about ten years or so now. I have always made
mine look and act like I wanted it to look and act. How did I do that? By
RTM, the Release Notes, things such as that, and asking questions. I did the
same thing when I used Windows.
As for me? I'm just user. You need to complain to the people that maintain
the menus. And I have no idea if any of them follow this general helper
list. Personally I would think not. And personally I don't care.
Rather than type here may I suggest that you use Bugzilla? Ask for a change
in the way the menu is laid out. That way you will get their attention. And
a much better argument too. :-)
I do. But if you are going to have a program that lets you pick the
application for some generic menu entries, it would make sense to
have it configure ALL generic application entries.
I always thought it was one of those 'Linux for Newbies' things. To make
things easier for them when they start out and not to scare them off with a
bunch of strange names.
IE: I want to open a document so "Document Viewer" sounds right. As opposed
to gedit or kedit or vim or many others. Or Web Browser. Or Email. And not
the actual name of the applications.
And if the Fedora folks found something better they would not have to edit
all of the menu entry titles.
However. I also edit my menus. I deselect things that I don't use and change
the listings to suit my wants and wishes.
15 years of professional experience have taught me one thing, the above
statement is not true. End users do actually care about the tools they
are using and their names.
Kevin has a fair point that should not be dismissed.
Comments
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Sharpe, Sam J at 05/05/2009 - 18:252009/5/5 brian < ... at logi dot ca>:
[sam@machine ~]$ rpm -qi evince | egrep "(Name|Summary|Version|Release)"
Name : evince Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version : 2.24.2 Vendor: Fedora Project
Release : 1.fc10 Build Date: Tue 25 Nov
2008 02:59:51 GMT
Summary : Document viewer
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By brian at 05/05/2009 - 18:51Thanks, Sam & Georgi. I'm having a little PDF issue: ghostscript is
complaining but Document Viewer is not. I needed to know that app is for
debugging info. This is perfect.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Kevin Kofler at 05/06/2009 - 03:10Yet another reason why programs should be named with their actual name in
the menus, not some generic name. :-/ This crap really needs to get fixed.
FYI, for next time, the easiest way to figure out what something
like "Document Viewer" actually is is to go to Help / About within the
program.
Kevin Kofler
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Bill Davidsen at 05/07/2009 - 14:56I think you have lost sight of the user here, the average user would see
"evince" in a menu and have zero idea what it is and does. It is a meaningless
collections of vowels and consonants which are unrelated to the function. The
name of the application should be available, but not at the expense of something
useful to typical user.
document viewer (evince)
document viewer (xpdf)
for examples.
Having the document viewer in graphics is probably not optimal, but there isn't
a perfect place on the menus, maybe "office" is a bit more intuitive.
In a perfect world there would be a click to get a useful description off the
menu. Until then "about" is a good thing to remember.
I find that I learn about a bunch of obscurely named packages by reading the
packages released feed or newsgroup. The one paragraph description is enough to
decide if a package might be useful, and wherever they come from it would be
nice to have a package->description tool. Or maybe we do and I just haven't read
about it yet. ;-)
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Kevin Kofler at 05/09/2009 - 01:55The correct thing to write is "Evince Document Viewer" (or any permutation
of this). And the freedesktop.org .desktop file standard says this should
be encoded as:
Name=Evince
GenericName=Document Viewer
Now somebody just needs to fix GNOME not to ignore GenericName, and
the .desktop files to use Name and GenericName as intended by the standard.
Kevin Kofler
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Bill Davidsen at 05/09/2009 - 13:48Yes, exactly. I might even suggest that the menu be built to say
"GenericName (Name)"
so that multiple approaches to a task might be more evident.
It also would educate the user about the application name as well as the service
it provides, which is a good thing.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Arthur Pemberton at 05/07/2009 - 20:35None of us have any idea what the average Fedora is. Making decisions
based on a fictional user is not useful. You need to worry about the
users here and now, that are represented.
Regardless of skill level, "document view" is not a useful search
term. Evince however is. Giving the user the ability to find
information, instead of assume it is more useful.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Bill Davidsen at 05/08/2009 - 16:27If you find a meaningless word in a menu more useful than a description of what
service it provides or problem is solves, good for you. Most people, in Fedora
or real life, would prefer that they know what's on the menu before ordering.
The average Fedorian is someone who has not studied every program in /usr/bin
just for the fun of it. And I admit that since I have other tools to view pdf
files (xpdf mainly) that I have never felt any curiosity about evince, nor would
I be likely to launch anything "just to see what happens."
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Tim at 05/09/2009 - 14:34I do. That's how I found out that XPDF was crap to use compared to
Evince, in most cases. Yet XPDF can view some PDF files that Evince
just showed a page not yet rendered.
I'm not keen on the idea of running random programs to find out what
they do. But I will try out alternatives, when I can see what a program
is supposed to be able to do.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Mikkel L. Ellertson at 05/07/2009 - 16:59Well, for a brief description of what a menu entry does, you can put
the mouse pointer on the entry and get a tool tip. On the other
hand, adding an option to the right-click menu to read more about
the application would be handy...
Mikkel
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Michael Semcheski at 05/11/2009 - 19:21On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Mikkel L. Ellertson
It seems like the mouse over hint would be the perfect place to
display the name of the application or package.
So for Archive Manager... "Create and modify an archiver. (aka file-roller)"
The Help -> About is not the answer. For instance, with File Roller,
it displays name of the app as "File Roller". Well that's nice, but
I'll bet dollars to donuts that the application binary isn't
/usr/bin/file\ roller. Nor is that the name of the package that
provides it. I had to open it up and use ps to figure out what the
binary is, and then use it to see what provided /usr/bin/file-roller.
So to me, I don't mind file-roller being called Archive Manager. But
I would like a way to see what I'm running before clicking on an icon
in a menu.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Tim at 05/11/2009 - 23:53There is a way, a messy one, though... Drag a copy of the item off the
menu onto the desktop, read the desktop file in a text editor, look for
the command in it.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Arthur Pemberton at 05/11/2009 - 23:46On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Michael Semcheski
That's what KDE 4.1.x (x < 3) does and it's stupid and annoying.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Tim at 05/07/2009 - 19:13Sometimes you get really stupid descriptions in there. e.g. The tooltip
for Amaya says "edit the web".
Gee! Really? Can I delete microsoft.com?
The desktop files used to populate the menus should have the proper
application name in the right place, a terse description in the right
place, and more details in the right place. And a user menu option
ought to select what's shown. e.g. select to show Names in menu, select
to show terse info in the same menu item, select whether the longer
detailed pop-ups do pop up, with the default to do the obvious name and
terse description. e.g. "Amaya, web page editor."
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Tom Horsley at 05/07/2009 - 15:25On Thu, 07 May 2009 10:56:34 -0400
Which brings up another thing that needs fixing: Meaningless application names :-).
I gave up on finding meaning in menu structures years ago. I finally learned
that the real way to find something is to grep the .desktop files under
/usr/share/applications :-).
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Tim at 05/06/2009 - 09:49Seconded! The menus should directly say "Evince document viewer," let
any pop-up additional help say something else (what it does). And it's
less than helpful that Evince is in the graphics menu, in Gnome. I
wouldn't ever expect to find a document viewer in a menu where I expect
to find things for dealing with JPEG files, and the like.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Gene Heskett at 05/06/2009 - 15:43Neither would I. That's busted. plain & simple.
Kevin: I tried to reply to your post last night, and verizon has now decided
this list is spam, I hope this gets through.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By brian at 05/06/2009 - 03:33Amen to that! I was trying to be polite but, to be honest, this really
was pretty annoying.
I just looked (again!) and realise that I'd completely missed the
"evince" part. What the heck is an "evince", anyway?
(rhetorical question--I'm sure it's something like an ogg)
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Rahul Sundaram at 05/06/2009 - 04:42You could have easily looked it up.
<a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/evince" title="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/evince">http://www.thefreedictionary.com/evince</a>
Other than a few well recognized brands like Firefox, generally end
users don't know or care about the application names and only the
functionality that it offers.
Rahul
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By brian at 05/07/2009 - 02:28That rushing sound you here is the joke sailing over your head.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Patrick O'Callaghan at 05/06/2009 - 14:03I disagree. I have at least three PDF viewers installed, any of which
could legitimately call itself "Document Viewer". Until the day comes
when there is Only One True Viewer, this is going to persist, and
obscuring the real name of the app helps no-one.
Why not "Evince Document Viewer"?
poc
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Mikkel L. Ellertson at 05/06/2009 - 14:28Also, if you are going to have a generic name, at lease have the
option of picking the application in the Preferred Application menu.
It is there for your WEB browser, mail reader, and a few others...
Mikkel
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By David at 05/06/2009 - 14:36Why don't you edit your menus to fit you own needs and wishes?
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By brian at 05/07/2009 - 02:37Isn't that what Patrick was suggesting?
Anyway, thanks all for the responses. It's heartening to know that I'm
not the only person who thought that was unnecessarily cryptic.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Arthur Pemberton at 05/07/2009 - 04:46You're not the only one. KDE 4.2 currently has this Gnomish behavior
by default, and it's driving me crazy. I've been informed however,
that it will soon be fixed.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Kevin Kofler at 05/09/2009 - 01:52Switch to the classic menu (right-click, Switch to Classic menu style), then
you see the apps presented in a more sensible way. Kickoff just sucks.
(Disclaimer: That's my personal opinion and doesn't reflect the position of
the majority of the KDE SIG.)
Kevin Kofler
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Tim at 05/06/2009 - 16:10Easy enough for those of us that know about it, not so good for anyone
else. Tell someone to load a page in Evince, and they can't find it.
Tell someone to load something in the document viewer, and you can get
an equally blank stare. They may not have it installed (what do you get
for yum install document viewer?), they may not find a document viewer
in the *graphics* menu, they may have more than one document viewer.
And, I seem to recall, that any time I customised a menu, my changes got
done with the next yum update to that application.
All in all, you present a poor argument compared against the system
having sensible settings in the first place.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By David at 05/06/2009 - 17:03I have been around Linux for about ten years or so now. I have always made
mine look and act like I wanted it to look and act. How did I do that? By
RTM, the Release Notes, things such as that, and asking questions. I did the
same thing when I used Windows.
As for me? I'm just user. You need to complain to the people that maintain
the menus. And I have no idea if any of them follow this general helper
list. Personally I would think not. And personally I don't care.
Rather than type here may I suggest that you use Bugzilla? Ask for a change
in the way the menu is laid out. That way you will get their attention. And
a much better argument too. :-)
Have a nice day.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Mikkel L. Ellertson at 05/06/2009 - 15:03I do. But if you are going to have a program that lets you pick the
application for some generic menu entries, it would make sense to
have it configure ALL generic application entries.
Mikkel
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By David at 05/06/2009 - 15:33I always thought it was one of those 'Linux for Newbies' things. To make
things easier for them when they start out and not to scare them off with a
bunch of strange names.
IE: I want to open a document so "Document Viewer" sounds right. As opposed
to gedit or kedit or vim or many others. Or Web Browser. Or Email. And not
the actual name of the applications.
And if the Fedora folks found something better they would not have to edit
all of the menu entry titles.
However. I also edit my menus. I deselect things that I don't use and change
the listings to suit my wants and wishes.
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Thierry at 05/06/2009 - 05:05Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
15 years of professional experience have taught me one thing, the above
statement is not true. End users do actually care about the tools they
are using and their names.
Kevin has a fair point that should not be dismissed.
my .02 cents
Thierry
Re: what is "Document Viewer"?
By Georgi Hristozov at 05/05/2009 - 18:23Hi,
brian написа:
<a href="http://projects.gnome.org/evince/" title="http://projects.gnome.org/evince/">http://projects.gnome.org/evince/</a>