Better synctex support?
First of all, many thanks for having created this beautiful document reader. I am opening this issue to inquire if there can be better support from synctex in evince, so that forward/backward searches can be implemented in a seamless fashion from editors, using evince as external pdf viewer.
Let me elaborate a bit. I am frequently using LaTeX for typesetting, and quite far back (5 years or so) was using the gedit LaTeX plugin, which was OK back then, but times have evolved. The issue lies partly with the plugin itself (which is a little dated and is missing some features), and partly with gedit itself, as it does not "gracefully" handle bigger projects. Unfortunately, it appears that the synctex capabilities of evince are only "really" available with the gedit plugin. Once one moves out of it, things are not as rosy.
I will give a representative example: vimtex. You can see in its features that a lot of viewers are supported for forward and backward search, but evince is not. This is not due to negligence of the author - as you can see in this issue, it appears that considerable work has to be made from the plugin's side for such capability.
Now, I do not claim to know how difficult it is technically to make it easier to use synctex with evince as pdf viewer, but it seems other projects manage this well. For example, zathura seems to be able to do it very easily, also providing a --synctex
cli option. (Again, this is just an example; evidently, all the viewers mentioned here can do this reasonably well. I have seen a "solution" mentioned here, but I think we can all agree that this is a rather complicated method (for a different plugin) that would anyway just result in being able to do forward search.
In conclusion: it would be great if evince had the same first-class support for synctex operations that other document viewers have. I am already using evince, I think it is great, and ideally I would not like to have to install another viewer just for the synctex functionality.