[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Question about which pdf viewer for gnustep

[Yavor Doganov]

Rogério Brito wrote:
> I have been surfing by the gnustep related pages and one thing left
> me with questions: is there any pdfviewer for gnustep?

Yes, there are three: Vindaloo (formerly ViewPDF), GSPdf and Yap
(formerly GPSText).  More details below.

> From what I saw, it seems that Vindaloo and others are very old and
> not packaged for Debian.

Vindaloo is in Debian (viewpdf.app), confusingly under the old name.
It's based on PopplerKit (Objective-C bindings for poppler).

> What is the preferred pdf viewer for gnustep?

I can't tell for sure.  Probably GSPdf, as it's the only one actively
maintained upstream nowadays.

> BTW, feel free to forward this e-mail to any mailing list that you
> think is reasonable.

Doing it now, although gnustep-discuss at gnu.org might have been a
better choice.

About the other apps:

  * GSPdf [1] is an old app, ghostscript-based, recently resurrected
    by GAP [1].
  * Yap [2] is the "newest" one, an a2ps frontend; no new releases
    recently.

Both have relatively poor rendering compared to Vindaloo, and provide
almost duplicate functionality, which is why nobody bothered to
package them for Debian.  If you find them useful, please file RFS;
hopefully we can manage to package it/them for squeeze.

[1] http://gap.nongnu.org/gspdf/index.html
[2] http://www.gnustep.it/marko/GPSText/index.html

> I am on the verge of stripping from xpdf the parts that poppler
> already imported and keep only the user interface in the sake of
> having something light and that can allow zooming arbitrarily
> (needed for many of my documents, especially when I am designing
> fonts, so that I can see details as serifs).

Good luck with that.