[Thunar-dev] PDF Thumbnailer

[Erik Harrison]

On 8/4/07, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> I want to include a simple PDF thumbnailer for thunar, which uses
> ImageMagick.  I know there is already one, but it depends on evince
> being installed which would require a number of gnome libraries - not
> everyone wants to do this, especially not for a simple thumbnail.
>
> The trouble is if I include a thumbnailer which supports a format
> already supported by an existing thumbnailer - what happens?  I presume
> mine (being added to the system later) would override thunar's default,
> which probably isn't the intended option.  If you have evince installed
> then I would say it is the best (fastest) means of thumbnailing a PDF.
>
> This this in mind I want to propose to Benedict that the .desktop files
> for each thumbnailer have another field:
> X-Thumbnailer-Priority
> which is a number: 1 being a low priority and anything above that
> increasingly higher priority.  The default priority for any thumbnailer
> in thunar should be 10, that way when I want to include (for example)
> the PDF thumbnailer I can set the priority to be 5... when
> /usr/libexec/thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1 is run by the user
> the highest priority thumbnailers which have their TryExec found will be
> added to the thumbnailer cache.

This seems like It's fairly useless. How do you coordinate priorities
between thumbnailers? And if you don't, then every thumbnailer just
uses Priority 10, and you still have the conflict, so it comes down to
looking for TryExec. Considering that the proposed usecase is that you
don't have evince installed, merely looking up the TryExec program
oughtta be sufficient, although I'm not sure it's possible.

It still leaves the possibility of conflicts which the user has no
method for easily resolving.

A more crafty solution might be to use whatever thumbnailer depends on
the preferred app for the mimetype, but that might be next to
impossible to implement.

>
> For example if evince is not installed and
> /usr/libexec/thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1 is run it,
> 1. looks at both thunar-thumbnailers' and thunar's (evince) .desktop files
> 2. sees that evince has a higher priority (because it is faster it
> should be given the higher priority)
> 3. sees that evince-thumbnailer is not on tha $PATH, so uses the
> thumbnailer with the next highest priority.
>
> This seems like the simplest solution to me, as it only requires the
> thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1 command to be updated.
>
> This also fixes a problem caused by ffmpeg-thumbnailer, which can
> override totem-thumbnailer.
>
> Erlend
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>


-- 
Erik
"If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there." - Ken Thompson