[Thunar-dev] Thumbnails for HTML documents

[Erlend Davidson]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> Erlend Davidson wrote:
>   
>>>> Thunar is able to show thumbnails of HTML documents if they were created by
>>>> visiting folders with Konqueror.
>>>>
>>>> Could this thumbnailer be built-in? Or how can I enable or trigger it without
>>>> Konqueror if it already is?
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Benedikt can correct me if I'm wrong, but Konqueror, Nautilus, The
>>> Gimp, and Thunar are share a standard Thumbnail cache. So even if
>>> Thunar can't create thumbnails for a file type, if another app has
>>> created them (such as viewing images in The Gimp) Thunar will show
>>> 'em.
>>>
>>> Thunar does have support for using Gnome's thumbnailers if GConf is
>>> around during build time - if you have Gnome installed and Nautilus
>>> has a HTML thumbnailer, then consider rebuilding Thunar. However,
>>> Thunar doesn't have support for finding and using Konqueror
>>> thumbnailers.
>>>       
>> How do the thumbnailers work?  Can more formats be added as plugins?
>>     
>
> Yes. They are separate programs that are invoked with the input file,
> the desired size and the output file. You can either register them with
> GConf or if the thumbnailer is simple (like the builtin thumbnailers),
> they can be hardcoded in thunar-vfs.
>
> If you want to contribute a HTML thumbnailer, feel free to do so.
I'd love to contribute some thumbnailers (I use some less common file
formats, e.g. eps and I'd love to have them thumbnailed).  The trouble
is, while I can program well in C++, I don't know where to start with
writing for thunar.  Is there a howto on writing plugins / thumbnailers?

I'm not even entirely sure what a VFS does, I assume it lets you view
files without having them in their normal folders?