First, no this is not an announcement of a Mac OS X version of ePDFView. It doesn’t make much sense to me, since Mac OS X has PDF support built-in.

My idea is to use my notebook as my main development machine, so I need a way to continue working on my projects. That means that I needed to install GTK+, but I didn’t wanted to use Apple’s X11. What I did was install GTK+ version 2.10.1 which has native support for Quartz, Mac OS X’s graphics subsystem.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to compile ePDFView with native GTK+, and this screenshot is a proof that I managed to do so

Of course there are some little bugs, both in ePDFView and GTK+’s Quartz backend, but the application is still usable (most of time…)

As finally I’ve added print support to ePDFView I decided to release version 0.1.5 today.

Besides the print support, this version also handles Internet hyperlinks and is able to save document’s copies. I’ve also fixed some bugs (thanks baze to report them!) and also some minor interface improvements; I’m very happy with the new keyboard navigation, thanks LoneFox.

Unfortunately, this time Moritz Heiber couldn’t update the German translation for work reasons. I hope it goes smooth with your new destination. The French and Vietnamese translations were updated, as always, by Mr_Moustache and VnPenguin, respectively. Thanks to all.

Finally! I’ve added printing support for ePDFView.

Currently only CUPS is supported, although I don’t see any problem with it as it’s possibly the most used GNU/Linux’s printing system. Of course, since it’s my first time I add printing support to an application, there’s still somethings missing like support for preferences or color modes (thanks baze for reporting them).

The print dialog is “strongly based” on Gnome’s print dialog, although not that beautiful. I think it’s pretty functional, though.

I expect to resolve the current issues and release version 0.1.5 this week

Since I have a job I can’t spend as much time in ePDFView as I want, so its development slowed down a lot.

This week end I was able to add support for URI links besides the already supported internal links. In order to do this, I also had to add a new preferences dialog asking to the user which command line to use to execute the web browser when such a link is activated. The default is to use Firefox because I think is the most extended browser in GNU/Linux desktop world.

I really don’t know if this is really a good idea for handhelds users that are using ePDFView since I don’t have any and can’t test it.

I hope next time I write and update is to tell you that I have added printing support as it seems to be the most wanted missing feature.

Today I’ve released version 0.1.3 of ePDFView. This version is just a minor enhancement update and some bug fixes. I didn’t add any new feature in this version, but fixed some annoyances like mouse scrolling, single click on outlines and save current window’s position and size.

Actually I had to make a new tarball after the release because I did use Glib’s g_file_set_content() function to save the configuration file. As I’ve been pointed by Mr_Moustache, this function is only available on Glib version 2.8.x. Since I want to keep the current depence on GTK+ version 2.6.x I had to change it.

After the release of version 0.1.2 of ePDFView, which uses Poppler’s glib wrappers, last Monday I have received a lot of support emails and some bug reports of users.

Being my first public open source project, I’m very pleased by the reaction and this makes me work on version 0.1.3 very motivated

I think this new version won’t have a lot of new features, mainly I’ll fix some odd behaviour like single click to select and index or mouse wheel scrolling, although I’m planning to add features like search and thumbnailing on later version.

What I really need to do, though, is learn how to use Trac’s roadmap, so all those ideas will become a little more clear than what can I write on a blog’s post

Anyway, since this version is mainly a “bugfix/minor enhancements” release I hope release it at the end of next week.

Since the public release of ePDFView on freshmeat and GnomeFiles I have received users comments about ePDFView not compiling.It seems that Poppler won’t support the old Xpdf header files anymore and don’t install them unless the –enable-xpdf-headers option is passed to the configure script. But the worst of all is that CairoOutputDev.h file is not installed on Poppler version 0.5.1. Since I use version 0.5.0 I didn’t notice that.

So, the first thing to do for the next version is use the glib bindings of Poppler, that seems to be the only way for GTK+ applications to use Poppler in future versions.

Today I’ve released another version of ePDFView, version 0.1.1.

This new version features the document’s outline, as I told yesterday, and also loading file names passed as command line parameters. This is an important because this means I can use ePDFView to load Internet PDF documents directly from the web browser.

This time also I’ve announced this release on freshmeat, hoping that someone else will find it useful. I’m also thinking to make an autopackage file for it depending on the feedback I get, if any, although I like the idea of relocatable applications anyway.