Editing features

[Tobias Deiminger]

Am 01.04.2019 14:35 schrieb Oliver Sander:
>> "Okular is a universal document viewer", yes we have *very light 
>> editing* but that's what people expect in a viewer. I don't think the 
>> general public expects a viewer to let them remove pages or reorder 
>> them.
> 
> I am not convinced of this claim.

I'd consider operations like separate, unite, reorder, remove, rotate 
and maybe even crop still as "light editing". I'd like 'em. Just like 
gwenview lets you resize, crop, flip - despite being a viewer.

>>> * A separate competitive pdf editing application is nowhere in sight,
>>>   and given the scarce developer resources that even Okular receives,
>>>   I don't see it coming anytime soon.
>> 
>> It's much simpler to do a separate app than do it correctly in Okular. 
>> Honestly i could code an app that let's you remove/reorder/merge 
>> documents in one or two days
> 
> I am sure that you are correct, but nobody is actually writing that 
> app.
> 
>> (then wait a bit for someone to draw a nice icon :D), poppler gives it 
>> to you almost for free (i mean there's pdfseparate and pdfunite that 
>> are basically what you want). So if people stopped trying to shoehorn 
>> those features into Okular and just started a new app we'd be all done 
>> much earlier.
> 
> Technically you may be correct, but politically it is the other way 
> around.
> In particular, I may be able to get funding for (simple) editor
> features in Okular,
> but I will certainly not get funding to start a KDE editing app from 
> scratch.
> 
> :-)

I agree with Albert that the need for a generic abstraction will make 
the features much harder. Additionally, those abstractions are mostly 
public API, which introduces some pressure to do it right in the first 
place.

Would it be reasonable to introduce an abstraction for the editing 
features, but implement it only for PDF for a start? (postulate: PDF is 
the most complex and the most used Okular format - odds are that it'll 
fit for others, and others can follow when there's time).

Cheers
Tobias