Ye olde gtk2 Evince is better

Evince is a PDF viewer. Easy Scarthgap has an old version, 2.32.0, the last based on gtk2. Easy Excalibur has Evince from the Debian repository, version 48.1, based on gtk3. I got fed up with using it today; the developers have wrecked the UI.

What I dislike the most, is it overrides the window manager and draws the window with one-pixel-wide borders, making it extremely difficult to use the mouse pointer to resize the window. Then there is the menu, the UI, stuff all over the place.

The old gtk2 version probably has less features, but I have been happy with it. It dates from 2016, but the source tarball I use has some patches; I don't recall from where, but anyway, the patched tarball is at my ibiblio.org source repository.

Here is how I compiled it in Easy Excalibur (in the devx container of course):

# tar -xf evince-2.32.0-patched20161004.tar.gz 
# cd evince-2.32.0-patched20161004
# patch -p1 < ../evince0/0001-Add-format-attribute-to-_synctex_malloc.patch 
# sed -i '/gnome-icon-theme/d' configure.ac
# export CFLAGS='-Wno-error=incompatible-pointer-types'
./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc --without-keyring  \
 --disable-scrollkeeper  --disable-dvi --disable-djvu --disable-nautilus  --disable-dbus  \
 --with-gtk=2.0 --disable-comics --without-gconf --enable-pixbuf --disable-gtk-doc-html \
 --disable-help --disable-static --enable-ps
# make
# DESTDIR='/mnt/sda1/downloads/downloads3/input687/0-evince/out1' make install

I have create a PET package, here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/pet/pet_packages-excalibur/

Named 'evince0'. In case anyone installs a Debian package that has evince as a dependency, that's ok, the Debian 'evince' can install.

'evince0' will be builtin in the next release of Easy.   

Tags: easy