Wednesday 26 July 2017

New Evince format support: Adobe Illustrator and CBR files

A quick update, as we've touched upon Evince recently.

I mentioned that we switched from using external tools for decompression to using libarchive. That's not the whole truth, as we switched to using libarchive for CBZ, CB7 and the infamous CBT, but used a copy/paste version of unarr to support RAR files, as libarchive support lacks some needed features.

We hope to eventually remove the internal copy of unarr, but, as a stop-gap, that allowed us to start supporting CBR comics out of the box, and it's always a good thing when you have one less non-free package to grab from somewhere to access your media.

The second new format is really two formats, from either side of the 2-digit-year divide: PostScript-based Adobe Illustrator and PDF-based Adobe Illustrator. Evince now declares to support "the format" if both of the backends are built and supported. It only took 12 years, and somebody stumbling upon the feature request while doing bug triaging. The nooks and crannies of free software where the easy feature requests get lost :)


Both features will appear in GNOME 3.26, the out-of-the-box CBR support is however available now in an update for the just released Fedora 26.

4 comments:

Bastien Nocera said...

Rock: Very unlikely. I was actually about to close this bug. The ePub format is incredibly ill-suited to what evince is good at, "page" documents. All the formats that evince supports represent a page, that isn't reflowable, or change size.

GNOME Books supports ePubs, and support for pagination is in the works. Looks through the bugs files against "gnome-documents" in the "Books" component, and you'll see a number of the bugs we're working on.

See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=browse.html&product=gnome-documents

Anonymous said...

What about DJVU format in the evince?

Bastien Nocera said...

> What about DJVU format in the evince?

Sorry, but what about it? It's been supported in evince for at least 10 years, from a quick glance at the git repository's history.

If you have specific problems with the support, or the way that it's packaged by your distribution, please file a bug in the GNOME Bugzilla for the former, and your distribution for the latter.

Unknown said...

Fantastic news. It will go very well in any professional workflow being able to test Illustrator output format and for lovers of comics will make me want to actually buy some.