[Thunar-dev] PDF Thumbnailer

[Benedikt Meurer]

Erlend Davidson 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.
> 
> 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.

The GNOME thumbnailers are used by default. Any thumbnailer installed
via a .desktop file overrides a conflicting GNOME thumbnailer.

> Erlend

Benedikt