Problems with evince

[Olin Shivers]

Could someone advise me on evince issues? I have three problems.

1. Evince is somehow screwing up font creation when displaying dvi files.

I can preview the dvi file fine under xdvi. When I try with evince,
I kicks off a slew of metafont font-creation runs, then shows me
totally garbled pages -- the layout is correct, but none of the
characters are right. This happens for documents that primarily use
Times Roman fonts.

2. *Every* time evince comes up, it insists on starting in continuous /
"fit page width" mode. I don't want either one. I want continuous-mode
*off* and the window in the "best fit" view. So I have to click, drag,
click, click, drag, release *every* time I pop up a file. It's very
annoying. There doesn't appear to be any key in the gnome gconf config
database I can set to affect these things. How do I fix this?

3. Evince appears to have *no* documentation. The application has been
around for *years*. Yet there is no documentation. Someone took
the trouble to put up a slick, attractive web page at
http://projects.gnome.org/evince/, which has some nice marketing for
evince, but no one has bothered to write up any documentation on the
app -- flags, settings, paging behavior, mouse chords, accelerator keys,
arrow key behavior: nada. Have I missed anything, or is this really true?

I stumbled over this issue in my attempts to answer issues 1 & 2.
I *did* find a FAQ which included issue #2. But it is just, apparently,
a frequently asked *question*; there was no corresponding frequently
replied *answer*. Just the question.

I'm aware that these questions probably more appropriately belong on
a gnome discussion list, but I couldn't find one when I was poking around.
If someone could direct me to a better place to post these questions, I'd
appreciate that, as well.

Thanks!
-Olin

[Copper Bezel]

Well, Evince does have a help page, accessed from its own Help menu, that does include some of the information on shortcuts and such that you mentioned. It's very limited, admittedly.

I couldn't find a config file for it, either, just a file that reports its accelerators at /home/[username]/.gnome2/accels/evince . It used to insist on displaying the navigation sidebar on my machine every time it started until I turned it off in View instead of closing the sidebar with the little X, but it's definitely saving some config settings somewhere.

Have you tried using Adobe Reader instead? It's heavier but tends to be more complete.

Edit: I'm not in the kind of field to be dealing with LaTeX, but I'm assuming you have all the relevant TeX support installed, so Evince should be able to handle this - I ran into a couple of bugs filed to Evince under Ubuntu involving .dvi, but not this one specifically. Obviously, the bit about Reader isn't going to apply to .dvis, either.