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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.