During the covid crisis, my vicar is sending out pre-recorded weekly communion services, the idea being that we all switch on together at 10.00 on Sunday. Each service comes in two files: the video itself and a service sheet in pdf format. The idea is to print out the liturgy in advance so that you can use it as you go along.

So of course my printer broke down yesterday! Things like that always seem to happen to me. I'm hopeless with hardware, so I am waiting for lockdown to finish, when hopefully a more tech-savvy friend can come and help me fix it.

In the mean time, I decided I would have to somehow display the service sheet on screen alongside the video. And of course I started off with Evince, the nice modern all-bells-and-whistles documentation app. Could I get a window of the right size alongside the video window? No, I could not! For some reason, Evince windows don't play nicely with Fluxbox and you can't resize the window properly. That is to say, you can shrink it vertically but not horizontally, which was what I needed to do.

So I went back to prehistory, i.e. Ghostview. It's old, it's ugly, but it works. In some ways, it's like Slackware itself, an old reliable carthorse that won't let you down. I was easily able to make a window one column wide to the left of the Firefox video window and then move between columns using the mouse. Problem solved.

Looks aren't everything! And I have learned that even when you think you need to print something out, you often don't.

I like xsane for this very reason. Yes, it's ugly but easy to use and very functional. I have had good luck with "atril" on fluxbox but I have the need to be able to copy strings/text from a PDF to other applications. Can Ghostview do that? I don't really care what applications look like, but care more about what they can do. Eye candy isn't everything...

I've never tried to copy and paste from a pdf. The LFS book warns you quite strongly not to try that because the copy tends to contain invisible characters which mess things up.

I don't like xsane because it has too many controls and I don't know what half of them do. I prefer xscanimage, which comes with the sane front-ends package. Or else simple scan.