[Okular-devel] Improving the book reading experience with KDE tech

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Diumenge, 23 de desembre de 2012, a les 01:18:23, Inge Wallin va escriure:
> In just a few weeks Calligra 2.6 will be released, and with that the first
> version of Calligra Author. The first version of Author will be very like
> Words but it has a focus on the needs of a book writer rather than, say, a
> report writer or a memo writer. Therefore we expect Words and Author to
> start to diverge in the feature set soon.
> 
> Version 2.6 of Calligra Author has support for creating ebooks in EPUB2 and
> MOBI formats. Both of these formats are rather simple and support text with
> various formatting and pictures. Okular has a generator for EPUB which makes
> it a decent basic ebook reader.
> 
> However, Calligra Author 2.7 will start producing EPUB3 files which are much
> more complex.

How different EPUB3 vs EPUB2 are in file-format? 

> I want Author to become *the* way to create teaching
> materials with dynamic contents (animations, multimedia, etc) but most of
> that will be meaningless if there is no way to read the generated files.
> EPUB3 is huge so Author 2.7 will start out by supporting embedded videos
> and embedded math formulas using MathML.
> 
> And this is where Okular falls short. The current generator does not support
> more than very basic formatting and math formulas is not part of that. And
> the whole API of Okular does not support anything but static content. 

We have support for videos (not sure if the Active frontend supports those)

> In
> the long run, this lack will diminish the value of Plasma Active and
> therefore I have also added the Active ML as a recipient.
> 
> Call to action
> -------------------
> 
> I would like to put together a small task force to enhance Okular with a
> better generator for EPUB as well as enhance the general engine to also
> allow dynamic contents. The first version should support video but in the
> future i can easily imagine other things like embedded scripted animations
> or 3D objects in X3Dom and so on.

As said we already support videos (not in epub but in pdf) so the 
infrastructure is there, you "just" need to wire it. Pino also did a proof of 
concept PDF-3D support ages ago, so it's nothing impossible to do, "just" 
needs some time ;-)

> I have looked at the code of Okular and it looks entirely doable. I could
> probably manage myself but then there would be no other work on Calligra
> Author for the 2.7 cycle and that would be bad.
> 
> I think this is an important task for PA4 and therefore Okular Active.
> 
> Any takers?

I guess the first step is making sure we are able to read EPUB3 at the same 
level of EPUB2 and then have a look at the extra features.

I can't commit to the development of that, since i'm faaaaaaaaar to stretched 
already in billions of stuff but if you need help wiring stuff up or 
navigating through the okular architecture I'm happy to help both here or in 
the #okular IRC channel.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> 	-Inge
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