I use Wacom Bamboo One tablet in my every day computing and I'm very satisfied with its performance when connected to my Ubuntu PC. But one thing I miss when compared to mouse is panning hand. When using tablet it is easiest to scroll by grabbing you document up or down. But, your application must support such "panning hand" GUI interface. With Firefox i use "Grab and Drag" addon and that's about all I need from my browsing experience when it comes to scrolling with my tablet. Most of the other desktop applications do not support "panning hand" and there isn't much we can do about it except grabbing source and getting our hands dirty. IRIE Shinsuke agrees, so he patched Gnome document viewer Evince with "panning hand" patch grabbed from Evince mailing lists. This patch unfortunately hasn't been accepted for inclusion to Evince (don't know why). Fear not, IRIE is here with Ubuntu PPA for Evince with "panning hand". So read on to find out how to obtain you copy:
First we need to add IRIE Evince PPA to the list of repositories.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:irie/evince |
After adding new repository we must update list of packages:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install update |
Last thing is to update Evince package to IRIE Evince PPA package:
sudo apt-get upgrade |
Now to take advantage of our "panning hand" enhanced Evince we must add panning hand to the Evince toolbar. Right click to the empty area on Evince toolbar and click "Toolbar". From the "Toolbar Editor" dialog drag "Pan Mode" icon to the desired place on your Evince toolbar. From now on you can click on "Pan Mode" icon to switch to the "panning mode". If you like your new Evince, enjoy. If not, read on for instructions for IRIE Evince with "panning hand" package removal.
Removing IRIE Evince PPA
If you want you can easily revert your Evince package to Ubuntu default using ppa-purge application. First we make sure that ppa-purge is installed:
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge |
Now we will purge IRIE Evince PPA from our list of repositories and by doing that downgrade Ubuntu Evince package:
sudo ppa-purge ppa:irie/evince |
That's it for this little how-to. As always, to leave your comment you can left click (no registration needed) on comments link on the top right of this post.
DevGenii
I installed this on my Dell duo with Ubuntu and it’s perfect! Thanks a million!!
Hi Aaron! Glad to be of assistance but IRIE Shinsuke should take credit for this one cause it’s his PPA, I’m just the messenger.
Nice! This should definately go into MASTER evince. I filed a bug, let’s see what happens.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665642
Thanks Arno. I really hope this patch gets trough Gnome devs this time 🙂 Thanks again to Irie for packaging it for Ubuntu!
Any plans for an oneiric release?
Doesn’t work for me. I think I added the repository but there’s a problem somewhere with getting the update as I cannot see the package in the update list. It is still the original evince 2.32 in the package manager. Might it be because I am using linux mint 11 not 12? Would really appreciate some tips.
Hi oldmajor,
this PPA is available only for lucid, maverick and natty based distributions. This translates into Linux Mint 9, 10 and 11. Your problem (99.99%) your problem is that Ubuntu has released minor bugfix to evince package, stapled newer tag on this so evince package from this PPA doesn’t show on updates. To fix this just go to synaptic, search for evince, go to “Package” menu and select “Force version”. From the drop down menu select package with something like “irie” in title.
Hi Marko,
Thanks for the reply. I managed to install the irie version with your advice. unfortunately, evince refused to start after that. So i’m reverting to the original evince.
I forgot to point out that it isn’t enough to downgrade only evince. You must do the same for its libraries libevdocument2 and libevview2 because this is all part of evince package. Hope this helps, good luck!
I found libevdocument3 and libevview3, downgraded them as well. Now evince can start, but I still can’t find “pan mode” in toolbar?
You must manually add button to Evince toolbar. I’ll copy paste from article:
“Now to take advantage of our “panning hand” enhanced Evince we must add panning hand to the Evince toolbar. Right click to the empty area on Evince toolbar and click “Toolbar”. From the “Toolbar Editor” dialog drag “Pan Mode” icon to the desired place on your Evince toolbar. From now on you can click on “Pan Mode” icon to switch to the “panning mode”. “
sorry, that was what I meant. I opened up the toolbar editor, but could not find a button called “pan mode”.
hm, now I really don’t know what to suggest. You’ve probably checked all evince package versions once again?
Turns out there is one additional package I did not force the version change. Now it works. Many thanks!
Great, I’m glad you got it working 😉