Evince title should be adaptable

Thank you for your bug. What version of Ubuntu do you use? Do you have an example to attach to the bug?

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 19:58 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> Thank you for your bug. What version of Ubuntu do you use? Do you have
> an example to attach to the bug?

Sorry, I suppose I should have thought to include that information. I
am currently using Ubuntu Edgy with Evince 0.6.1, Using poppler 0.5.4
(splash).

I will need to try to find an unencumbered example, because at this time
the only example files that I know that have this issue are files that I
cannot (under agreement, due to copyright) redistribute. I might be
able to try to see if I can trim it to just the first page, which should
qualify as fair use to provide an example.

    — Mike

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In the meantime (since I don't know how to trim PDFs without actually re-printing or modifying them or something similar), here is some additional information the one of the PDFs in question. The output from this command leads me to believe that the thing was actually saved with a title of “untitled”, which is really annoying, because that is something that the diligence of someone in the chain of creation should be able to fix. Nonetheless, here’s the info:

mbt@pepper:~$ pdfinfo phi101_week4_reading2.pdf
Title: untitled
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 6.0.1 (Windows)
CreationDate: Thu May 12 15:32:35 2005
ModDate: Thu May 12 15:32:35 2005
Tagged: no
Pages: 48
Encrypted: no
Page size: 612 x 792 pts (letter)
File size: 1113613 bytes
Optimized: yes
PDF version: 1.2
mbt@pepper:~$

For things like this, it would still be nice to be able to have a preferences selection that permits the window title of Evince to choose between “display the file name” or “display the PDF title” or even some mixture of the two.

evince seems to display the PDF title if there is one or the filename otherwise. Having an option only to workaround documents shipping with a buggy title doesn't look like a good idea, especially that upstream already has a lot to do and that would be really low priority on the list. I would rather close that bug and blame the PDF, does that seem reasonable to you?

On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 15:58 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:

> evince seems to display the PDF title if there is one or the filename
> otherwise. Having an option only to workaround documents shipping with a
> buggy title doesn't look like a good idea, especially that upstream
> already has a lot to do and that would be really low priority on the
> list. I would rather close that bug and blame the PDF, does that seem
> reasonable to you?

Is it unreasonable to give users the option to choose to see a PDF title
vs. the file name of the PDF? It is just a feature request. I suppose
it can be closed and if I ever manage to gain the ability to implement
it myself, I can do that…

it's not "unreasonable", GNOME applications just try to not get hundred of configuration options and rather adopt the right behaviour. There is already http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386292 upstream about a similar topic

As it turns out, this bug is a violation of the GNOME HIG.

In light of that, and in the interest of Evince doing the right thing and being less confusing to users, here is a debdiff to fix the window title for Evince. Diffstats:

For the evince source package:
mbt@sage:~/programming/ubuntu/evince$ debdiff evince_2.22.0-0ubuntu2.dsc evince_2.22.0-0ubuntu3.dsc|diffstat
 debian/patches/02_follow_gnome_hig.patch | 106 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 evince-2.22.0/debian/changelog | 7 ++
 2 files changed, 113 insertions(+)

For the upstream source:
mbt@sage:~/programming/ubuntu/evince$ diffstat evince-2.22.0/debian/patches/02_follow_gnome_hig.patch
 ev-window-title.c | 70 +++---------------------------------------------------
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 65 deletions(-)

Patch has been submitted upstream, also.

This patch is somewhat trivial, and is not a feature patch but a bugfix, can this be included in Hardy? The description on this bug states it is a feature request, but this was before I was aware that the confusing behavior went against the GNOME HIG... makes sense that the HIG state that the filename should be in the title, since that avoids confusing issues like this one. :-)

A build is available in my PPA for Hardy, if someone wants to see the effect of the patch: https://edge.launchpad.net/~mtrausch/+archive

The issue is fixed in Oneiric

The issue seems to be reappeared (at least to me) in Bionic, with Evince 3.28.2