Gwenview was unique among other “image viewer” packages for its ability to also show pdf images. Many of us have hundreds of pdf-formatted image files that we would like to be able to browse through. Unfortunately support for pdf viewing has been removed in newer versions. Please bring it back. It can be an option, so if someone doesn’t want it they can deactivate it. But please don’t destroy what makes KDE uniquely suitable for power users! Gwenview and Konqueror are incredibly helpful and powerful. Please keep them as such!
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Can you help me understand what’s the problem with using a different app (such as KDE’s Okular) to view PDF documents?
Thank you for getting back to me. Okular is great, but can show one document at a time. Many of us use pdf format to keep images, especially those in vector format. When studying patterns of diseases, for example, we can easily generate hundreds of these pdf images per day. What is sorely needed is a “slideshow” type of package for pdfs, so we can quickly go over them and identify patterns unique to each patient/disease, for example. I hope what I wrote makes sense! I would really appreciate it if you could help bring this feature back for Gwenview. Thanks!
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That seems like a valid use case. However, I have to ask… if these PDF documents are simply containers for vector drawings, could they simply be saved in the SVG format instead of PDF? Then Gwenview could see them as images and let you use it the way you expect.
Adding to the context: PDF has somewhat better/native support in LaTeX compilers, as a consequence it is often, still, the format of choice for vector figures in scientific papers.
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SVG rendering is still broken in Qt, it fails to render/recognize many tags from full SVG standard.
That’s true, but saving SVG to PDF is quite an ugly workaround for that issue. In addition, a number of the highest profile issues with the Qt SVG renderer are being fixed for Qt 6.7. Finally it’s not clear that @Vlab is doing this to work around that specific issue.
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SVG rendering problem is not limited to Qt/Plasma, even known tools like LibreOffice, Geogebra… suffer from it.
For example, I create figures in Inkscape, Geogebra… then export them to PDF, then import them to LibreOffice Writer, and finally export the ODT to PDF.
On Windows, I used EMF as the only reliable vector format to import figures inside Microsoft Word.
PDF format keeps all details including fonts, colors, gradients inside one file, while SVG is good but each app that will embed it has always some sort of limitations (it supports a subset of SVG standard).
The only problem with a figure as a PDF is that it’s rendered as raster inside LibreOffice Writer with fixed resolution, but the exported PDF embeds its full vector content.
PDF is more “cross-platform”. IIRC, the Windows image viewer doesn’t show .svg and .svgz. Unless you drag the file into a web browser.
FWIW, if your use case specifically involves browsing across multiple PDFs, a possible way to back into it could be using something like PDF Arranger to open many at a time and browse across their pages?
The OP is asking ‘why’; why was this ability removed from Gwenview? I doubt the reason is on a ‘need to know’ basis (re: Classified), where end-users can’t be told.
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Right now, I would be happy if either one worked…I am getting by w/ qpdf. Something got busted when I changed Qt versions so I could use QGIS, and trying to figure out which particular combination of repos was working (w/ openSUSE)
We have a customer who LOVES gnome-sushi. So much so, that he’s willing to risk the stability of KDE by installing all the conflicting Gnome libraries that get dragged in when he does so. If Gwenview (or Dolphin) were to provide high-fidelity previews of PDFs, he would have no need for it. Might it be possible to render them with mupdf?
Is there a way I can contribute a plugin to do this? Because it would be super helpful for me too.