On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Scott Kostyshak <skost...@lyx.org> wrote: > My motivation for this proposal is that in so many cases I have seen > "LyX doesn't open/update my PDF" and when SumatraPDF is proposed, I > see responses of "that works" and "wow I like this PDF reader". Here > are some examples: > I may be the odd one around here, but why not Evince for Windows? I've tried SumatraPDF on several occasions, and never managed to get used to that. Evince on the other hand is incredibly simply and intuitive, and among other things refreshes files from disk automatically.
Liviu > http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg98064.html > https://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg99586.html > http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.editors.lyx.general/84530 > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/9512 > http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/179639/pdf-crashes-after-previewing-from-lyx > > And from trac, here are some related issues: > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/9512 > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/9299 > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/8672 > The following two are quite old and probably not relevant. > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/3573 > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/3045 > Uwe notes in that bug the following: > "I also reported this to the Adobe people but as often with closed > source nobody cares abotu this, only if you have a support contract." > > The topic of bundling SumatraPDF with LyX has previously been discussed here: > https://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org/msg185207.html > In particular, Uwe wrote a detailed response with his thoughts, and in > the end concluded that he was not in favor of bundling SumatraPDF. > From what I understood, he brought up three reasons against the > bundling: > > (1) The increase in size of LyX's installation file because of bundling. > (2) The license is not 100% free because of the non-free unrar component. > (3) Users prefer their own PDF reader. > > In response to (1), SumatraPDF is only 2.7 MB. Further, we already > bundle eLyXer and JabRef. Note that we would not have to install > anything. As Enrico notes, we can drop the standalone binary in the > PATH and we're done. It doesn't even write in the registry and the > preferences are stored in a text file placed alongside the exe. It > would suffice placing the executable in a directory under the LyX > directory tree that is already in the PATH prefix. > > In response to (2), as of SumatraPDF version 3.0 a free component is > used to unrar (see http://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/news.html) so > SumatraPDF is now 100% free. > > In response to (3), I think that users do not realize the advantages > of using SumatraPDF and this justifies the bundling and default > configuration. As Enrico states, "SumatraPDF is far superior to Adobe > Reader when used as a viewer for documents produced by LaTeX, because > a document gets autoreloaded on change and forward/reverse search is > supported." Forward/reverse search could be supported out of the box > (instead of the complicated configuration described here: > http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/SyncTeX). > > A final advantage of bundling SumatraPDF, is that if there is someday > a problem with PDF viewing, we could (potentially) debug the issue > ourselves, and ship a previous/patched version of SumatraPDF or send a > patch upstream. > > In the end, I agree that the user should be free to use the PDF viewer > of her choice. However, to change to Adobe Reader, all the user has to > do is go to preferences and change it. It is much more likely that a > user realizes this (or can easily google it) than the user realizes > that to solve their problem of a PDF not opening they should install a > new PDF reader (I don't think it is obvious that they should blame > Adobe Reader and it makes sense that they think LyX is at fault). Note > also that in SumatraPDF, the user can easily open the file in Adobe > Reader by selecting File -> Open in Adobe Reader. > > Scott -- Do you think you know what math is? http://www.ideasroadshow.com/issues/ian-stewart-2013-08-02 Or what it means to be intelligent? http://www.ideasroadshow.com/issues/john-duncan-2013-08-30 Think again: http://www.ideasroadshow.com/library
