Talk:File viewer

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It would be nice to have some links to file viewer....

What about GNU info ? How does this relate?

Contents

[edit] Merge

I suggest Image viewer be merged into this article. An image viewer is a type of file viewer, and the material in that article would be very much at home here. Rwxrwxrwx 19:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge?

I came to this article while looking for text oriented file viewers, which is what I think of when I hear "file viewer." In a sense, almost every program is a file viewer of some sort. Browsers leap to mind, and all of the Microsoft read-only viewers. I think text viewers and image viewers are big enough categories to keep separate.

[edit] Intentional limitations

"A file viewer is a limited-functionality software in a sense that it does not have a capability to create a file, or modify the content of an existing one. Instead, it is used only to display or print the content. The primary reason behind this missing functionality is due to marketing considerations..."

Many user-oriented proprietary-format applications are read-only for marketing reasons, to try to sell the full versions for more money. But, this is not at all true of file-viewing utility tool programs. These are read-only on purpose, in order to be safe-use no-worry tools. Also, being read-only makes them simpler, smaller, faster, more agile. A simple tool can quickly browse back and forth through a file, showing a small window, without having to load the whole thing into memory. -69.87.199.227

[edit] Text file viewers

The article is missing links to actual file viewing programs. Three free portable ones are listed here: [1]

  • "Universal Viewer Free (formally ATViewer) is a file viewer that supports many different formats like text, binary, rtf, images, videos, audio, etc. One nice feature is that it can open large text files very quickly without eating memory. One downside is that there is no editing of these files, but useful if you have to go through large log files."
  • "DAMN NFO Viewer is an utility for viewing text files containing ASCII art (eg. NFO and DIZ files). The viewer displays graphical block characters correctly, and automatically detects and displays hyperlinks/email addresses as clickable links."
  • "Large Text File Viewer is designed for viewing large text files. It uses little memory and is able to open very large files (> 1GB) instantly. Background file indexing makes browsing even faster. It also allows the user to perform high-speed complex text search by means of plain text or regular expression."

-69.87.199.227 18:49, 17 August 2007 (UTC)