Re: Overriding pdfview

[Sietse Brouwer <sbbrouwer@gmail.com>]

A summary of things people have said in this thread. NB: everything is
paraphrased, so blame me if anything seems overly terse in tone.

----

Bill doesn't have or want SumatraPDF

Hans made SumatraPDF the default because it has lots of nice
properties that Acrobat doesn't have

Luigi thinks maybe mupdf is the right candidate (evince and okular are
OK, xpdf doesn't work under 64bit, linux acrobat is old)

Siep uses qpdfview, perhaps? Suggests it

Bill uses Calibre, personally (and he thinks it would also be  bad if
ConTeXt assumed everyone uses Calibre)

Bill likes the idea of bundling a PDF reader with ConTeXt

Hwitloc doesn't use Acrobat at all

Luigi mentions that Adobe Reader is the reference PDF viewer -- what
doesn't work in Adobe Reader might as well not work at all.

Hans agrees Reader is the reference, but prefers sumatrapdf or okular
for edit/view cycles

Sietse thinks ConTeXt should start by using the user's default pdf
viewer --- via open / start / xdg-open. It is then up to the user to
override this setting for ConTeXt.

Hans thinks this has a problem [on Windows?]: there is start
myfile.pdf, but no stop myfile.pdf. Which doesn't play well with Adobe
Reader, which cannot handle open PDFs being updated.

Aditya proposes -- in jest -- to read the user's mailcap file (on
Linux, presumably).

Pavneet thinks there is merit in this 'read the user's mailcap' jest.
Also, he likes evince.

Luigi has found Evince sometimes has printing problems with PDFs make by MkIV

----

I'll repeat what I said, though: the PDF reader that is (a) most
likely to be installed, and (b) is most logical / least surprising to
the user, is: the user's own default PDF viewer. Adobe Reader may be
clunky for this purpose, but IMO the user's choice should nonetheless
be respected.

It is easier, and less aggravating, to look up 'what is a better PDF
viewer than Adobe' than 'why does ConTeXt not respect my default PDF
viewer setting?'

Cheers,
Sietse
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