Editing features

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimarts, 26 de març de 2019, a les 10:17:48 CET, Oliver Sander va escriure:
> Dear Okular developers,
> 
> at my day job I get asked about certain (pdf) editing features in Okular.
> Specifically, people would like to be able to delete and reorder pages,
> merge two documents, etc.
> 
> In the past, such editing features have been contentious, with people
> wishing Okular to remain a pure viewer.  Is that still so?  

Yes

> What would
> happen if somebody sent patches or funding for the features mentioned
> above?  Would they be accepted?

Given that Okular has no maintainer it'd be an interesting discussion to have.

> 
> My own take on the editor debate is:
> * (some) editor features would make a lot of people happy
> * I see no harm in adding them to Okular (basically the only GUI additions
>   would be some extra entries in the context menu of page thumbnails)

"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.

> * 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 (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.

Okular has quite some abstractions that make it work with 17 different file formats, so adding new features means you need to think it in a generic way which means it's not going to be one or two days.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Thanks for sharing your opinion,
> Oliver
> 
>