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A nice feature in evince is that when you close the program and later reopen the same pdf, it automatically jumps to the page you were reading. The problem I have is that I often read ebooks on several computers and I have to find were I was on the last computer I was reading the pdf. I think syncing these bookmarks in UbuntuOne would be a killer feature for people like me who read pdfs on different computers.

By investigating a bit, I found where evince was storing this data. It is in the gvfs metadata and it can be accessed for a particular document by typing

gvfs-ls -a "metadata::evince::page" myEbook.pdf

Rather that querying a particular file, I'd like to query the whole metadata file located in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home for the home directory, for any file where this particular attribute is set to some value. The biggest issue is that gvfs metadata and stored in binary files and we all know it's not easy to get something out of a binary file.

So, do you know any way to query the gvfs metadata for some attribute?

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  • This question seems abandoned, there is not further information or activity added to it for several months. I am flagging this to be closed by a moderator. If you think this issue is still affecting you you can flag a moderator to re-open it. Feb 2, 2012 at 16:46

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As for doing it properly, this would probably involve replacing the backend code that services metadata with a couchdb backend. You can also access all of the metadata from code if you want to program something to solve this killer feature.

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    thanks for the quick fix, but I'm afraid that it may produce unwanted side effects. The metadata affects pretty much every file in the home folder and synchronizing a gvfs-metadata/home on one computer would destroy all metadata on other computers (unless the home folder contents are 100 % identical everywhere). Nov 17, 2010 at 23:21
  • Sounds like it needs real development. Nov 18, 2010 at 1:20
  • I would prefer not to touch evince's code, I don't know enough about C programming to handle this. I might ask Alexander Larsson about the format of gvfs metadata, if there's one guy that should know this stuff, it's him. Nov 30, 2010 at 13:08

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