Comment 23 for bug 379403

Sebastian, I just ask for the *drop* to be disabled on the *same* window. This is surely feasible. Firefox does this. Of course it is nice that you can drag an image e.g. on the desktop. Then I will report the other bug on some graphics being able to be dragged, some other not.

This is certainly not unfeasible. Firefox implements this with html. Evince is a viewer and should do the same. Openoffice, which is an editor and not a viewer, instead allows you to drag on the same document, because it makes sense there. In evince it does not make sense. The current way evince does it is an implementation driven, not interface driven, feature.

So you say: "there is [NO?] easy way to make a graphical distinction between real text and a bitmap showing text so people will always be confused in the second case when trying to select text which will not work"

Indeed, precisely because there is no easy way, it is bad if we load a page of the document in front of the user when he drags from the same window. The user is confused by not being able to tell the difference in a second. When I first noticed this bug I was really confused myself, as others have confirmed above.

and: "there is just no good way around this annoyance out of making impossible to select text at all in any document"; no, there must be as firefox does that. Try for yourself, it will not accept drops of its own image, but it will allow you to select text and images, and also to drag an image over *another* firefox window.

Note in passing that evince already distinguishes drags over text from drags over an image and behaves differently: in the case of an image, it initiates a drag and drop operation, in the case of text, it initiates a selection. So if you ever wished to disable drag of graphics without disabling selection of text you could. In fact, evince in hardy did not drag images, but allowed to select text. However this paragraph is not aimed at convincing you to disable drag and drop of images. I am not asking for that.

The way to disable the *drop* is to modify the list of accepted *drops* on the window and has nothing to do with the "on drag initiate" code. Should really be a trivial patch, do you see this now?

If you agree that this can and should be fixed, I can try better in the source of evince as it is easy to find the relevant code; studying a bit of gtk can be good for me.