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popoolmica
Asked: 2020-07-22 01:28:07 +0800 CST

Evince shows small frame in Presentation mode

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I recently noticed that Evince started showing the following unusual behavior when in Presentation mode (after F5 is pressed) on my laptop: instead of making the slide occupy most of the screen, it keeps it to a pretty low dimension, and fills the rest in black, as in screenshot below.

Zooming seems disabled in Presentation mode, despite working outside Presentation mode, and I couldn't find any other related options to adjust, so I can't find a way to enlarge the slide back.

This makes it quite unusable for seminars and for screen sharing. Does anybody have any suggestion? Many thanks!

enter image description here

pdf presentation evince slideshow

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 and evince 3.36.7. I have met the issue.

    After searching in evince official repository issues I think the answer is in:

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/1486

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/1504


    Basically, the issue is introduced when fixing an issue on Wayland but forgetting to limit the fix to Wayland. You should either use Wayland protocol, or use a newer version of envice (you can install the newer version from snap, flathub, etc). For example, use evince from snap: 
    sudo snap install evince
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  2. This is likely only tangentially related to your problem, but for the sake of creating a tutorial video in a given resolution, I needed fullscreen mode with a fixed size of 1280×720. Unable to find anything in Evince's command line arguments and options that would have helped, in the end I turned to running an Xnest server with the given resolution and started Evince inside.

    I experienced exactly the problem you described. In my case, the culprit was that Evince started with its (X server given?) default window size and had no window manager available to tell it what size it actually wanted to be at. Starting xfwm4 in that artificial Xnest server helped: now Evince could ask to go fullscreen.

    What does this imply for your problem? Not much likely, except that the configuration of your window manager is likely the best place to be looking for with regard to why the window resizing in presentation mode goes wrong, or even does nothing at all. And it might be worth trying out a different window manager (if necessary, by using a different desktop environment). If all else fails, using Xnest may work in the context of "screen" sharing though it would help more with specific application problems rather than, say, finding the best way to do something using your standard desktop.

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